Garmin vívoactive 5 GPS 42mm Smartwatch, AMOLED Touchscreen, All-day Health Monitoring, Advanced Fitness Features, Personalised Sleep Coaching, Music, up to 11 days battery life, Black

Review after <1 week of use. For background, my fitness routine is currently weights training around 1 hour 2 times per week and occasionally a 1-2 hour casual walk at the weekend. I wanted a smart watch that could track my overall health, fitness and my workouts, but not something with crazy accurate GPS and gate analysis etc for runners.For my use, it’s perfect so far.Mostly easy to setup using the Garmin Connect app, and found a good watch face that matched the info I wanted displayed using the Garmin Connect IQ app which is a separate app that you can use to customise the watch and the data it displays. Slightly annoying there’s a second app for this but not the end of the world for something that once you set up you may not change for a while.One barrier to updating the watch face is that the watch needed a firmware update as most tech does, but to do this update I had to connect to my laptop and download the Garmin Express software, there were a few updates to run but all was easy.The charging cable is USB C, so consider if you need an adaptor. The end that attaches to the watch is secure. Extremely secure. It fit so well that when I unplug it I’m worried that I’m going to cause damage because of how hard I have to pull it. I guess I’d rather it was tight than loose and didn’t charge well.I’ve turned off the always on display and turned off gestures so that the watch doesnt light up when I turn my wrist in order to preserve battery longer. I just have to tap the screen or press a button the activate the screen.On full charge it said on screen the battery would last 12d, that seems to be tracking accurately 4 days later.One small annoyance I have is the “play” in the side buttons. You can press them in but not enough to actually activate the click which is frustrating. I’m used to it now and just have to be more firm, but it would be nice to have more responsive buttons.The watch tracks your calories burned during the day and during activity, this needs to be calibrated by tracking a 10-15 minute walk or run which is easy to do. The Garmin Connect app can link to apps like MyFitnessPal so when I’ve done activity it’ll update my calories in MyFitnessPal so I can see my deficit easily.The watch sleep tracking I’m not convinced on accuracy yet, last night for instance it thought I fell asleep an hour after I actually did.Overall great watch I’d highly recommend, it has many inbuilt workout routines & sports tracking I’ll never use but it doesn’t feel I’m missing out of functionality. It does exactly what I’m asking of it brilliantly

I use to only use Fitbits but decided it was time for a change. This is a fantastic watch and I'm so glad I bought it.As a fitness tracker it's not the cheapest on the market but it's good value as you get so much for your money. It tracks all the usual stuff plus lots more. I liike the indepth sleep reports and body battery feature which gives me an idea of how well I'm looking after myself. The sleep tracking seems to be in line with what I expected each night, especially the start ands end times. I like the nap feature but find it only pickls up some of my naps regardless of whether they are 20 minutes or 3 hours but I'm happy to set it going manually so not the end of the world to me.I use it to track my gym sessions which is so easy to do, press a button to start and stop each set which means it also records rest periods. After the workout Garmin guesses what each exercise was and surprisingly it gets some correct like flat bench press but it's easy to correct/add any it missed which then also highlights what parts of the body you worked amongst other things.I like that Garmin is compatible with so many othyer platforms. I use Zwift and although I rely on my bike for stats including heart rate (chest straps will always be more accurate) it's nice to get my stats included into all my other Garmin stats including seeing the details of my rides on my phone or watch. I use Conquerors challenges but I manually log steps and get activites indirectly from Strava as I found linking Garmin directly double counted steps i.e. added my overall steps each day plus the same steps from activities such as walking on top of that. Contact them and they blame Garmin which is an annoying shame.As a watch it is bright, easy to read, well made, looks sleek and customisable. The battery life really does last around a week or so, I don't tend to use GPS very much so can't comment on battery with it's use. I like features such as the find my phone, which I've used lots of times.I like the meditation on the watch including the follow along programmes but mostly I just set it running while doing my own thing just for ease of recording.Lastly, I love the fact you get so much without subscription fees unlike Fitbit which would require you to pay to get all stats.

I bought this after giving birth to motivate me to move more. The watch is comfy, I love the personalised faces and my baby loves to play with it on my wrist too! It's my first garmin and is excellent for GPS and I like a lot of the features and tracking on the app. However, I have found its definitely missed naps and got my sleep quite wrong (something I'm painfully aware of with a baby) so it seems less accurate than my previous fitbit for sleep. Steps seem pretty accurate although it's a challenge pushing a pram as I can easily lose 1-3 thousand steps compared to my partner because I'm pushing the pram but I know this would be hard for any tracker to adjust for! I really like it overall though and will probably stick with garmin going forward.

Bought as replacement for a Fitbit. Husband wanted something a bit different and he's happy. Does all the normal "fitness" stuff also shows you the notifications etc. Screen is very clear and bright colours. He quite liked that it said " happy birthday" on the day! Easy to set up -if he can do it anybody can! Lightweight and smooth sided. He likes it.