Gadgetory

I'll cut right to the point the fever active 3 is my new favorite fitness tracker and that's because it takes a lot of the best features from older Garmin devices and puts them into a newer and more premium looking design so yeah the first thing you're going to notice when you look at the vivoactive 3 is that new design if you're familiar with the older vivoactive HR then that was quite a square bulky industrial looking plasticy fitness tracker this looks a lot more like a watch in fact it looks quite a lot like the Phoenix 5 which is a much more expensive model from Garmin gone is the square design you've now got a round watch race and that's surrounded by a nice stainless steel bezel the screen is bright and punchy which is also a big improvement from the older devices and that's got Gorilla Glass 3 to protect it from scratches and around the back it's nice and flat and that makes it very comfortable to wear there's no ugly protrusion where the heart rate sensor goes meaning that when you take it off you don't have a nasty red mark on your wrist this looks like a watch it feels much more comfortable to wear and it's easy to forget you're wearing it which is something you definitely could have said about the previous models it's a lot less conspicuous under a suit and in general it's something you can wear comfortably all day which is kind of the point of a fitness tracker the device comes in 3 different colors and that includes a slightly more feminine white and that's very welcomed because the older devices were very masculine and if you want more personalization customization then you can buy new watch straps for it and the good news here is there's no proprietary technology it's just your regular 20 millimeter strap so yeah the device looks good it feels good it's also durable and it's water resistant up to 50 meters so you can take it running in the rain you can shower with it and of course you can go swimming and use the swim tracking there as well note that you won't be able to use the heart rate monitor at the same time as swimming and there's no open water swimming so if you are a professional swimmer this might not be the watch for you but for most of us who just want to use the pool for a bit of a cardio workout every now and then it should be perfectly sufficient and speaking of activity tracking this device has got it all going on there are 15 different profiles in total that includes all of your regular stuff like walking jogging cycling and some more unique and interesting options like golf like elliptical like Miska lanius cardio workouts and like strength which I'll get to more in a moment of course this being a Garmin watch and Garmin being well known for their GPS devices running and walking that's where it's really at this is a very good running watch so yeah Garmin uses not only GPS but also GLONASS which should runs more accurate and in my test it does seem to track my roots very well what's also really good is just how much information gaffe to run so you get all of the usual stuff such as your heart rate your time and different heart rate zones your average pace your best speed etc but you also get some more interesting options such as your elevation during the run thanks to the barometer and you get your cadence which isn't always available and you'll even get an estimate for your vo2 max which is very useful for seeing your general fitness improve over time so select new feature that comes over from the vivosmart 3 is weight lifting tracking and the idea here is that it can count reps and identify different exercises for you this is a really useful thing in theory in practice not quite so much so the rep counting even is hit or miss a lot of the time I'll do 8 or 10 and it will say I've done 6 or 7 or 15 so you'll have to edit it manually in terms of identifying the exercises I do think it's really impressive it can do this at all and I am amazed when I do a bench press or I pull up and it tells me that's what I did but again it hits and misses on about a 50/50 basis so that means a lot of the time I'll do one exercise and it will say it's something different or it just won't know at all and of course there are some exercises that you're never gonna be on a track so if you're doing a leg press for instances you don't move your upper body there's no way that that can be detected and all other exercises I do just won't be on there like a muscle up isn't going to be detected by your beaver active 3 and not only that but a lot of time I won't just do a normal set of exercises then just do 3 sets of 10 I'll do a drop set and mechanical drop set I'll hold it at the end I'll do a burn set I'll do force reps and these are things you just can't pick up I do complexes and this is stuff that is just beyond the ability of a fitness tracker to register so this is a useful feature at all well not for me really but for the average gym rat which just does 3 times 10 of their different exercises then arguably it could be somewhat useful the fact that it has this nice big screen and the touch screen needs that if it gets it wrong you can very easily edit the exercise or the number of reps and fortune if you want to enter your weight on here for some reason it goes up by one and you'll just be tapping like this so that's not terribly helpful but yeah it could be sort of useful for some people and I do hope that Garmin keeps working on this because in theory like I say it's a good idea one other thing I will say is that in principle something like this takes your head out of the game and being mindful of your workouts and being focused on what you're doing is really important the mind muscle connection is really important and if you're taking ages to input your data on your wrist and you're forgetting sometimes to press start and stop then again it kind of takes your head out of the game and you might have a slightly less intense workout as a result our knee would not be impressed so this is the difference of vision I'm gonna see guys texting then that's to us this is Mickey Mouse stuff but that aside as a fitness tracker is very good it's got a lot of different options and a lot of different features the ability to change the readout on the screen is super helpful and you can even design your own workouts and put them on your wrist you can download workouts so really it's a very feature packed fitness tracker for heart rate monitoring doing your exercises elevators back once again and this is one of the better heart rate monitoring solutions that you can wear on your wrist again it's not going to be as accurate as a chest worn heart rate monitor and for something like weightlifting it's going to be particularly difficult because the contractions in your muscles actually alter the blood flow that makes it more difficult for heart rate monitor on your wrist to work but again for most people's purposes it's more than sufficient and I haven't had any problems with it I think it's fairly accurate and of course during the day it will monitor your health and tell you things like your steps taking your heart rate and it will measure your sleep and show you that and this is all once again fairly accurate and it is useful to be able to see how you perform during the day whether you could be a little bit more active you get your movement reminders as usual although you can turn them off they annoy you and you can have an auto adjusting goal so that it gives you realistic step targets it's all very good just helpful little reminders to keep you active and healthy it does synchronize with My Fitness Pal and that's also very useful because if you're tracking your calories to lose weight or following your macros then this can save a lot of time and effort for you as a sleep tracker it's not one of the best Fitbit does do it better not only does it not give you the same breakdown of information as a Fitbit does but I find it's not that good at auto detecting when I fall asleep and wake up sometimes it's very good and it'll tell me that I've been awake for 10 minutes because I needed the loop other times it's not so good and it'll think that I was still asleep when actually I was awake for an hour so sleep tracking isn't my favorite feature on this but it's nice to it there nonetheless in whatever shape it takes one slightly more novel aspect for health tracking and life logging is the ability to measure your stress this should monitor your heart rate variability which in turn tells you whether you're sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous system is dominant in other words it tells you if you're in fight-or-flight more or rest and digest more this is something of a novelty my friends really enjoy it they like asking me Adam how stressing you and I go oh I'm 90% stressed and it can be useful as well because it has this rest timer on it so if you feel stressed and you and your wrist tells you your stress you can take this two-minute timeout and do a little breathing exercise you can make it longer or shorter I always think that this would be a good place to put a meditation app but I've yet to see a fitness tracker do it I'm not sure how useful this is really though in theory it could be useful it could tell you a little bit about how recovered you are after your training because heart rate variability also cover Lakes with your recovery so it can tell you whether you're ready to go to the gym again or not but for now it's just kind of a fun novelty and it doesn't always correlate with how I'm actually feeling in general I'd like to see fitness trackers and companies synergize their information a little bit more for instance wouldn't be good to see whether or not your stress levels affect your workout quality or your sleep quality that's the kind of thing I'd like to see in future and hopefully the companies are just collecting all this data our gonna be sticking that into some big algorithms and we can get more useful insights like that in future another slight criticism of this device and of Garmin fitness trackers in general is the app whilst it has a ton of data and it's really good for that and I like all the insights it gives you and the ability to compare yourself with other people your similar age on the other hand it's rather obtuse to navigate the UX is not particularly good and a lot of stuff you're not going to discover because it's so hidden behind the layers of menus it's not as good as fitbit's but it does the job and once you get used to it it's not really a big issue but something that often gets overlooked with these Garmin devices is that they're also actually quite good smartwatches so you get your notifications on here and you can see text you can even respond to text you can see your whatsapp messages you can see your calendar appointments and all that regular stuff you also get the ability to control your music playback though unfortunately there's no music storage and that will lose at some point against competitors like the Fitbit ionic which can do that but where this device really comes into its own as a SmartWatch is it's ability to install custom-made apps from the community so you can head over to the connect IQ store and here you can download a range of different things so there's a ton of useful and not so useful stuff on here I've got Tetris and I've also got Tasker and this means that in theory I can control any feature of my phone from my wrist which is very cool there's also custom watch faces so you can again change the look of your device even more unfortunately when I download third-party watch faces at the moment they drain the battery but hopefully this is something they'll be patched before the watch is officially released and another new feature is Garmin pay which means he should be able to use contactless payments from your wrist because getting out your phone is apparently now too much effort to be honest this is something I'd like to use unfortunately it wasn't ready for testing at the time that I got the review device but in theory it should all work and it means that yeah you don't have to fiddle around with your phone even let alone a wallet Garmin says that the device has got a battery life of seven days in practice it's a bit closer to four or five days but when you consider all this stuff it's got packed into it that's actually pretty good so you're in a nutshell the garmin vivoactive 3 is just a really good fitness tracker it combines pretty much all the different features and activity tracking options that you could want and then some and puts it into an attractive and affordable design this is an example of a company iterating on previous generations and coming up with something that is just the best version of what it can be and for the end user those are often the best kind of devices of course it would be nice to see a little bit more innovation in this market but for now this is one of the best all-round fitness trackers you can buy as you can tell I am a big fan so thanks ton for watching guys I hope you found this video useful and interesting if you did then please consider leaving a like down below and comment on this video let me know what you think of the vivoactive 3 what features would you've liked to have seen and which other fitness trackers do you think give it a run for its money of course subscribe to the channel if you want more like this hit that Bell button to get notifications and check out and rudra 30.com for we are your source for all things Android