Garmin Vivoactive 4
The Garmin Vivoactive 4 isn’t the same as a Forerunner watch.
Vivoactive is Garmin’s range of touchscreen fitness watches. Back in the Vivoactive 3 days, this was a great slimmer, smaller alternative to the Forerunner and Fenix watches.
But Garmin has made its watches designed for real running nerds a lot more accessible in recent years.
So where does that leave the Vivoactive 4? The Vivoactive 4 is still significantly cheaper than most Fenix and Forerunner alternatives, and smart changes to the controls mean you are much less likely to accidentally pause and stop exercise tracking with touchscreen swipes and prods.
The Vivoactive 4 looks fairly similar to the Vivoactive 3 and Foreunner 645. A band of silver, but not chrome-bright, metal sits around the edge of the watch. Its screen is protected by Gorilla
Glass 3 tech, but it’s not recessed like the Fenix 6’s, making it slightly more vulnerable. Every bit of such protection adds to a watch’s dimensions, though.
This is a comfortable watch to wear, but again the Forerunner 645 wins out slightly here. The Vivoactive 4’s standard silicone band is thicker and has less “give” than the Forerunner’s. The lighter and smaller a watch is, the less likely you are to notice it is even there on your wrist after a few hours.
The Vivoactive 4 has a 1.3-inch screen of 260 x 260 pixel resolution, the same specs as the Fenix 6.
This display won’t look too impressive to those who haven’t owned a Garmin or similar watch before. These are transflective screens, meaning they reflect light so they become clearer on a bright day.
This is the polar opposite of the LCD and OLED screens used in a lot of other smartwatches. They have to increase brightness to compete with sunlight, rather than being “powered” by it.
The Garmin Vivoactive 4 is an excellent fitness tracker.
Switching from the Forerunner 645 Music, you actually get several more stats to pore over. There’s Pulse OX, which measures SPO2, Body Battery and Respiration.
Music is perhaps the most important extra feature of the Vivoactive 4. There’s a big difference in price between the standard Forerunner 645 and Forerunner 645 Music, but here you get music streaming as standard.
And that means 3.6GB of storage to add podcasts, playlists and albums. You can plug your Vivoactive 4 into a laptop to add files manually. The file system pops up when you do, and there are separate folders for podcasts and music. The Garmin Vivoactive 4 puts the tech smarts of the watches used by the ultra-marathon-running elite into a more accessible wearable.