What’s New in the Garmin Vívoactive 3

Garmin has not yet announced their new Vívoactive 3 smartwatch, but Dave Zatz today pointed out a link to a full PDF of the Vívoactive 3 PDF manual. (Here; link active at time of posting.)

Tech site SlashGear picked up one major new feature: the addition of Garmin Pay, which enables you to make credit or debit card payments from your watch.

For those of us who are more interested in the fitness aspects of the watch, here are some highlights I picked up from reading through the user manual—I’m sure Garmin will make their own official announcement this week.

The Vívoactive 3 is a touchscreen device. But there’s also something I’ve never seen on a watch before: what Garmin is calling “Side Swipe Control,” a grooved, touch-sensitive area on the side/body of the watch. (Number 3 in image below.)

It’s a great idea, especially since touch screens are notoriously difficult to navigate mid-sweaty workout. By contrast, the Side Swipe Control allows you to “slide up or down along the textured area to scroll through widgets, data screens, and menus.”

You can navigate widgets, data screens, and menus via touchscreen, too, but having this additional way to do it seems to be one of the major contributions this watch makes.

Here are some other new features, compared to previous Vívoactive models:

• VO2 Max estimates (“on the device, your VO2 max. estimate appears as a number, description, and level on the gauge”)
• a new “stress level” metric (based on daily heart rate variability)
• ability to calibrate treadmill distance—I don’t remember previous Vívoactives having this, but it’s welcome addition, since the Vívoactive HR (now called “Vívoactive 2”) was quite inaccurate on treadmill activities
• ability to view personal records from the watch itself
• use of GPS to mark and save a location, then navigate back to it (the TomTom Spark 3 has this, but now it’s on a Garmin—cool!)
• compass “with automatic calibration”
• customizable watch faces, so you can select which data fields display

It’s still the multi-sport, activity tracking, wrist-based heart rate monitor watch the previous models were. Steps are counted, sleep is tracked, weather is displayed, move alerts remind you to get up when you’ve been sitting an hour, and more.

If you were hoping that the Vívoactive 3 would add stand-alone music playing, the manual does not suggest that capability.

I used the Vívoactive HR for a while, but ended up returning it. The watch itself was good, but the Bluetooth connection kept dropping, the weather was consistently a few hours or days off, and the rectangular look was a little unpleasant. The Vívoactive 3 is certainly more aesthetically pleasing than previous models!

No idea what the price point will be, but I’ll post again when release is official.