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Watch faces / activities customization options?

During the past year I wore Instinct Solar watch exclusively, but I want to start wearing mechanical watches again. To look less funny, I want to replace Instinct with a small fitness tracker (to wear on my other hand). Vivosmart 5 ticks most of the boxes, but I still have a few unanswered questions. Could any owner please chime in?

1. what are the options for "home screen" customization? I saw a couple of examples, but I can't find a complete list. Manual mentions it in generic terms as well. I am mostly interested to see current time in simple digital form, current heart rate, battery and date + weekday. Is it possible to use this kind of combination and make it "permanent"?

2. what are the options for customizing the activity screens? I use basically just two activities - walking (distance, timer, heart rate, cadence) and bike (distance, timer, speed, heart rate). From reviews it seems that I can have only 3 items on the screen, is there any workaround to display 4 items easily (or cycle through them automatically)?

3. does it activate anything on the screen while showering? My Mi Band used to react crazy to showers or swimming, activating random activities or changing settings. I would hate if Vivosmart did the same. Instinct with non-touch screen is awesome in this regards.

4. what is the real battery life if used as a fitness tracker - sleep + HR tracking enabled, SpO2 disabled, no notifications? What is the usual power consumption in GPS enabled activities?

Thanks in advance!

0 9500060 over 2 years ago

1- I don’t think so

2- use the gauge feature

3- it doesn’t

4- around 3 days. But sleep is one of the most useful and insightful features in this band. Amazing and accurate analysis of sleep

0 5840817 over 2 years ago in reply to 9500060

Thank you, just a few follow up questions if you don't mind.

1. So there is no way to have at least heart rate displayed by default whenever I turn the screen on? What would I need to do to see my heart rate in the quickest way during daily usage?

2. Is the gauge feature a separate screen showing heart rate + zone? Is the switching between screens automatic, or would I have to swipe between them manually?

4. Is your estimate of 3 days including oxymeter, or just HR + sleep tracking? I don't use oxymeter on my Instinct watch because of it's inaccuracy and extreme battery consumption.

0 9500060 over 2 years ago

1. You can have heart rate displayed but in small text at the bottom of the screen by swiping on the small text until you reach heart rate

2- the gauge feature shows automatically for a few seconds together with a vibration based on the criteria you setup

4- including oxymeter during sleep only. Not full day. You actually don’t need it full day. You can measure it in case you want at anytime. it also includes activities tracking. Although the battery lasts for 3 days I always prefer to recharge it while showering but not to 100% in order to increase the battery lifetime and accordingly the band life time. Lithium batteries have a max lifetime that is based on the number of cycles of charging them all the way up to 100%. So, every time I notice the battery is around 20-30% I charge it up to 70-90%. I do the same with my iPhone and iPad to extend the batteries life. Same concept actually.

0 5840817 over 2 years ago in reply to 9500060

Thanks again.

1. If I understand it correctly, you can switch data fields for example on these two watch faces (random photos from the Internet). Do the selected items stay configured for example after you browse the menu or restart the watch, or do they reset to the default items after some time? Sorry to keep coming back to this, but the manual is very lacking and I know that Garmin can have some pretty unintuitive or questionable design decisions.

0 9500060 over 2 years ago in reply to 5840817

they don’t stay fixed. If you change the menu or restart they change

0 5840817 over 2 years ago in reply to 9500060

I got the Vivosmart 5 tracker yesterday and you are right that the behavior of selected data on the clock face was very erratic. It didn't change when browsing the menu, but kept moving when scrolling in widgets. However today's upgrade to v2.83 seems to fix this behavior. I have time, date, steps, heart rate and battery selected (non default data types) and they stay on the screen even when I browse the widgets up/down.