I purchased a Vivoactive 4 (£269) this week in order to support:
a) Losing weight
b) Getting fit
c) Tracking sleep quality (I am an airline pilot/shiftworker - so sleep patterns can be erratic which concerns me)
At the same time I also purchased the Honor Magicwatch 2 (£129) because its feature set is much the same (HRM, pulse oximetry, sleep tracking, specific sports tracking) and I loved the look. Both watches were updated to latest firmware/software.
Some impressions from a couple of days wearing both watches:
LOOKS: The Honor is a more attractive design, it resembles a pilot style chronometer, the AMOLED screen on the Honor is massively better than the Garmin with a lot of very crisp and stylish designs available for download and it's also noticeably bigger. It's simply in a different league. I'm so impressed with it that I have now ordered the Garmin Venu (which is a Vivoactive 4 with an AMOLED screen).
ACTIVITY TRACKING: Both watches track heart rate, steps, movement/breadcrumbs/routes equally well. Both did a very good job of monitoring my activity through a workout (cycling) and a walk. I plan to compare them when rowing on my ergo next.
GPS ACCURACY: Both watches locked on to GPS and tracked equally accurately, the Garmin takes noticeably longer to lock on at around 60-90 secs, the Honor watch locks on in 15-30 secs.
BATTERY LIFE: Reported as 7-8 days on the Garmin and 14 days on the Honor. Neither will reach that figure at present because I am engaging and exploring them more at present because they are new than an established user would. The Garmin is certainly needing to recharge more frequently though.
SLEEP TRACKING: Last night my wife and I both fell asleep around 10.15pm watching a film downstairs after some red wine. We woke around 1pm and came to bed. I spent around an hour on the internet looking at smart watch stuff on my laptop before going back to sleep around 2.15am until 7am. The Garmin accurately tracked the first sleep period from 10pm-1am but failed entirely to recognise I returned to sleep at 2am for a further 5 hours! The Honor watch accurately tracked and combined both sleep periods. This is a major concern to me. As a shift worker whose sleep patterns have suffered due to my career/jetlag/different rise and sleep times this feature is essential and I am keen to get it working. I would welcome any tips on how to improve things!! At the moment though the Garmin is next to useless. I should point out that I am a Garmin fan, I use their units in my car in preference to TomTom but really bonded with them when I was learning to fly in Arizona and used a 196 flying GPS as well as other more sophisticated units fitted to the aircraft avionics.
EXERCISE DISPLAY: When I went out for a bike ride the Garmin shows some basic and useful data against a white background such as speed, distance and heart rate. The Honor by contrast has an awesome display giving all the usual parameters but also a fantastic traffic light circle around the outside of the watch showing blue (warmup), green (aerobic), amber (Anaerobic) and red (Extreme) training zones. I found it really useful to be able to glance at my wrist on hill climbs and didn't need to look at the HRM numbers but could see which zone I was in just by colour and could tell when to back off the effort. The display as mentioned before was also bigger and clearer.
OXIMETRY/SPO2: Garmin offers the ability to track oxygen concentration during sleep automatically to help with diagnosis of sleep apnoea. The Honor doesn't do this and only offers on the spot SPO2 currently. It is possible this will change with a further update because the Huawei GT2 which is a close relation of the Magicwatch 2 has recently introduced this feature via a software update. So far though that's an easy win for Garmin.
APP: Garmin wins this hands down. Their app is a beautifully presented and detailed suite of information with lots of data to view. It's easy on the eye and nicely suppoprted by graphics whether you are using it on an iphone (which I currently use) or an Android (which my wife uses). The Huawei health app has some good pages but the presentation is nowhere near as good and much more superficial. It does draw pretty graphs for heart rate, sleep phases etc but the overall impression is that that Huawei have a fair bit of catching up to do in this area. It's worth pointing out that there is a massive difference between using an Android and Apple device too with the Apple software running about 3 generations behind the Android. On the Android for example you can easily import music to the watch and download some truly spectacular watch faces, with the iphone version you cannot. Some measurement parameters are only available on the Android too.
EXTERNAL APP LINKS: Garmin wins this too with the ability to link to Myfitness pal, I did start using that app to track calories but got bored after a while as it is a bit tedious and life is too busy! The Huawei app has no integration with other app providers.
WATCH USABILITY/INTERFACE: The Garmin interface is quite hard to navigate compared to the Honor watch which also uses two buttons and a touchscreen. With the Honor it seems instinctive to navigate and use the bottom button for back and the top button for select. With the Garmin I find myself getting frustrated sometimes trying to get to a particular screen or display and have to resort to random swiping and button pressing to try to find something. The buttons on the Honor are also much easier to press because they stick out like chronometer buttons, the Garmin buttons are almost flush and can be hard to press when the watch is on the wrist. The clearer display on the Honor has some really nice HRM graphs actually on board the watch, in short there is perhaps less need to actually review the app although it only gives totals for sleep on the watch and doesn't break that down into REM etc without the phone app.
So I expect by now you can see my dilemma and both watches have their strengths. The Honor is half the price, hands down better to look at, easier to use, more intuitive and has better battery life and equally good tracking in everything except sleeping O2. The big downside is I would have to buy a new phone to benefit from the ability to add music to my phone or to download faces. I could borrow my wife's Android to do that and then re-pair with my iphone because I won't be adding music or watch faces regularly to the watch. The Garmin though has a much nicer app and the chance to add a cyclecomputer on my bicycle as part of its ecosystem. The crushing blow to the Garmin however is the very poor sleep tracking, if I can't solve this then it is a no-go. I have a Garmin Venu arriving today which I hope will solve some of the display limitations of the Garmin.
I'd be very grateful for any views and hope that people feel I have given a balanced view here. If anything I wanted to join the Garmin ecosystem, but so far everything is pointing me to the Honor and it would leave enough money for a nice set of wireless earbuds for the bike rides. The big downer is that to get the best out of it I might want to spend say £150 on an Android phone and that negates any financial benefit.
Views? Especially on how to solve the Garmin sleep tracking issue!
Jon
