The VivoActive 3 is a smart watch, with hartrate and GPS. This review starts off friendly but ends in a nightmare.
Plus:
+ a nice digital watch with all the basics: time, stopwatch, timer, etc. as one could expect. Time is synced over the GPS.
+ the watch has hartrate, stepcounter, gps, which are being used by many pre-installed app that measure your activities. These apps are easy to confgure to your personal wishes.
+ via internet one can download extra watchfaces and apps
+ via a cable one can upload your activity recordings to a website that shows all kinds of historic graphics and gps tracks. All this should also work over bluetooth but keep reading for this.
+ automatic software updates of the watch (via the cable)
+ easy to understand touchscreen interface
Minus:
- the battary lasts at most 7 days, but mostly not more then 3 days. After this one must recharge via the garmin specific ubs cable. So, there you will have another custom cable floating around in your, overloaded, drawer. And, yes, one day it will be lost and never found.
- one can not replace the battery. So, in say 5 years, the battery is dead and the watch a throw away item.
- one should consider how long will Garmin support this watch. In a few years Garmin will stop offering updates and slowly the compatibility with the app/laptop will be lost. Again, only solution will be to throw away the watch.
- this watch has a GSP and i bought it at an outdoor shop. So i was expecting more outdoor-navigation options. But these are very, very limited. it is more a smart/fit-watch then a navigation watch.
But then we get to the real big issues:
-- in theorie this watch should talk bluetooth to your phone and should be able to do smart thingies. But the bluetooth connectivity is really dramatic:
1. (re-)pairing the watch with your phone is nearly impossible. I needed 10 retries to make this work. Most of the times the pairing-process just hang somewhere midway, with no visible progress. Only progress was the battery running empty.
2. Once you are paired, the bt-connection keeps dropping any moment. It really does not last for more then 2 minutes, even with watch + phone next to each other. There is even a non-official 'Reconnect Garmin app' for android that tries to re-connect every 5 minutes or so. Meaning I can not be the only one with this problem. As a side note: i often use a bt Philips headset on my Samsung phone, no problem, never ever, always works on end.
3. the watch is expected to be smart: it should over the bt phone link do smart things like show the weather report, control spotify, do volume up/down, show messages, show agenda items, etc. But none of this works. Really it manages to completely NOT work: Volume up sets the volume to max, volume down as well (!), next song skips 4 songs, find your phone make your phone beep but there is no option to switch off the beep, except to turn off the phone(!), messages are shown on the watch but when you want to see the details it loses the bt connection. It is really this dramatic.
--- well, ok, no problem. We will ask Garmin support and i am sure they will have an easy answer, right? Well garmin support manages to only answer the very basic, basic questions. On any question that goes beyond the basic online FAQ they will remain silent, even after several friendly reminders. Even a reply like "this is a complex question for which we need some extra time" would be appreciated but was never received.
And this last item, well, i think is a scandal. Selling a 300 euro watch containing broken software and not offering proper support. Well done, Garmin! You suck.
So my conclusion is: as a plain simple watch the VivoActive 3 is a nice product but way too expensive and a too short battery life. As a smart-watch it simply does not work. Buy a different brand. I returned mine to the shop.
