Rather than targeting the ultra-fit, Garmin‘s newest wearable is aimed at the everyday person. The Vivosmart 5 is the latest in its range of fitness bands. Unlike the company’s admittedly stellar lineup of sports watches, the Vivosmart 5 sticks to the basics.
You know, basics like step tracking. Sleep scores. Heart rate. Stress tracking. Pulse oxygen. The general sort of thing for people who want to be fitter but don’t need VO2 Max updates on a regular basis. Perhaps the best thing about Garmin’s new fitness band? It lands in South Africa at less than R3,000.
Vivosmart 5 is alive!
Part of the price is the construction material. A combination of silicone, polycarbonate, and acrylic makes the wristband lightweight and durable. It’s all the plastic, see? It’s packing an 88 x 154 OLED display that Garmin says is 66% larger than that found on the Vivosmart 4.
The battery will (supposedly) last seven days between charges. That’s not quite the same endurance offered by Fitbit’s Charge 5, but it’s not shabby either. If you’re throwing blood-oxygen measurement at it, you’ll ding up time a little more as well.
It’ll measure all of the other basics too. Heart tracking accounts for abnormal rates, with notifications for slow and abnormally high heart-rate. Heart-rate zones, which might be cribbed from Fitbit a little, are also available.
A range of notifications is available, including call notification and rejection (for Android users). On-wrist messages and emails are possible, assuming you hate yourself enough to put those there. And then there are safety features, like Livetrack, incident detection during workouts, and even assistance, a feature that we’ll be sure to test when a review model turns up in the next while.
If you’ve got a smaller wrist, and don’t want to wait for the review, then you’ve got a few colour options in your future. The Vivosmart 5 is available in Cool Mint, White, or Black. If you’re a little larger than average in the wrist department, you’re stuck with just Black. Which is fine, that’s the perfect shade for these things anyway. The Garmin Vivosmart 5 is now available at R2,600.
