Garmin vivoactive 5

I have had Garmin products for at least 10 years. I had the vivofit 3 and 4 and loved them, but I had bought several 4's and they kept dying on me after I changed the batteries. So, I decided to give the Vivoactive 5 a try. I love it! I love the features and I love the GPS!

I bought this a month ago and it’s okay, but from everything I had seen the reviews everything I was really let down

This Garmin even has more features and functions then my past one. Awesome watch...

I switched from a FitBit and it's fantastic! It definitely tracks my heart rate better and overall is more accurate compared to the FitBit. I am using it 24/7 to get a baseline on activity, sleep, and overall health - so far so good! Quick syncing to my phone and other apps makes this a no brainer!

Achat il y a deux semaines pour remplacer vivoactive 4 , écran noir subitement, reset impossible, 4 ans d’âge. Ma vivoactive 5, a deux reprises est devenu avec un écran noir, durant 4h la première fois, une nuit complète la deuxième fois, rest impossible puis soudainement, tout redevient normal. Il semble que ce soit fréquent avec la 5

# Garmin vívoactive 5: Great Fitness Watch, Terrible Sleep Tracker ## Rating: 2/5 for Sleep Tracking I’ve been using the Garmin vívoactive 5 for sleep tracking over several weeks, and while it’s a solid fitness watch, the sleep tracking is fundamentally unreliable. If accurate sleep data matters to you, look elsewhere. ## Major Sleep Tracking Failures ### 1. **Completely Misses Sleep Periods When You Change Locations** The watch frequently fails to track entire sleep sessions if you move to a different bed or room mid-night. Multiple times, I woke up in the middle of the night, moved to a different bedroom, went back to sleep for 2-3 hours, and the Garmin simply stopped tracking—pretending I was awake the entire time. This isn’t a minor glitch; it’s a fundamental flaw that makes the data useless for anyone dealing with fragmented sleep. ### 2. **Cannot Distinguish Between Sleep and Watching TV** The watch regularly mistakes lying still on the couch watching TV for sleep. On multiple occasions, it logged 1-2 hours of “sleep” that was actually me lying down watching Stranger Things or other shows. If the device can’t tell the difference between unconscious sleep and conscious TV watching, what’s the point? ### 3. **Fails When You Remove the Watch** If you take the watch off during the night (for a shower, for example), it ends the sleep session entirely. No recovery, no second tracking period—just missing data. This happened multiple times and makes the watch unusable for anyone who might need to remove it briefly during the night. ### 4. **Co-Sleeping Interference** When my toddler slept in bed with me, the watch’s tracking became even less reliable. Movement from another person seems to confuse it, leading to either missed sleep periods or wildly inaccurate wake time calculations. ### 5. **Inconsistent Data Accuracy** Comparing the Garmin’s data to my actual sleep experience revealed huge discrepancies: - **Dec 14**: Watch showed 3h 45m of sleep ending at 3:26 AM. Reality: I was awake 2:30-6:00 AM (3.5 hours), then slept until 8:30 AM. The watch missed an entire sleep period. - **Dec 15**: Watch claimed I went to bed at 10:51 PM. Reality: I was watching TV until midnight. - **Dec 17**: Watch showed no data at all despite wearing it all night. When your sleep tracker can’t even get the basic start/end times right, the detailed sleep stage data (deep/light/REM) is meaningless. ## What Actually Works To be fair, the watch does work reasonably well when: - You sleep in the same bed all night - You don’t remove the watch at any point of the night and reapply it - You’re sleeping alone - You go straight from awake to bed (no TV time) In these ideal conditions, the sleep stage breakdown seems plausible, and the efficiency calculations are probably in the ballpark. But who has perfect sleep conditions every single night? ## The Bigger Problem The fundamental issue is that the Garmin treats sleep tracking as a simple motion + heart rate algorithm. It has no way to verify whether you’re actually asleep or just lying still. It can’t handle anything outside its narrow assumptions about how sleep “should” look. For someone trying to address chronic sleep issues—the exact use case where accurate tracking matters most—these failures make the watch actively unhelpful. You can’t identify patterns or measure progress when the data itself is fiction. ## Bottom Line **Buy this watch if:** You want a fitness tracker with decent battery life and you only care about general sleep trends (e.g., “I usually sleep 7 hours”). **Don’t buy this watch if:** You need accurate sleep data for medical reasons, sleep therapy, or tracking actual sleep patterns. The tracking is too unreliable to be useful for serious sleep ----- **Tested with:** Garmin vívoactive 5 **Testing period:** December 2024 (2+ weeks of nightly use and external journaling) **Use case:** Sleep restriction therapy for chronic middle-of-night insomnia

I love all the ways to track my activities on the watch and on the app on my cell phone. There so many ways to track many different activities, more than I will be able to use. But for many people it can be wonderful tool for real active individuals. I had a vivoactive 3 watch for many years before I decided to upgrade to this new vivoactive 5, GREAT move. I liked mine so much that I got the same watch for my wife. It has been very great for us to share the data we are gathering on our health.

I was able to order this one.. Came in and what great functionality.. Has everything I needed

Took me a while to figure it out. Way more features than I'll ever need.

I bought this about 3 weeks ago and it’s amazing! I love how it helps me with overall health. I love how I am Now more disconnected from my phone. Because has an Apple Watch previously.

Stopped tracking heart rate correctly in less than a month. Tried all the troubleshooting and resetting and still doesn’t work. Target won’t allow a return.

Good watch

Does exactly what I was hoping for without overwhelming me. I was looking for something to help me understand my fitness and track my exercise as well as sleep. I still wanted it to have smart watch features as well, though. It does all of this well. How I have it set up, the battery lasts me 7-10 days. Battery life was another important feature to me.

I like my watch and would recommend it to others. It tracks a lot of metrics that were confusing at first, but have grown on me and now I appreciate. Overall high marks, very nice products Issues: It is not great at monitoring heart rate. Some time it reads low values and I move my watch a bit and then reading recovers. Maybe it a problem common to all wrist type measurement, so I understand why some people also buy the chest monitor. I plan to, but they currently have a long lead time. It also seems to have some delays in syncing Active Activity with my iOs health app. Might be an iOS issue. Finally, a second charging cable would be helpfuil. I ended up buying a set on-line, and did buy the older stayle USB A since most of my home chargers are this type. But great product overall, Santa might be bringing my wife one.

The watch looks nice and it’s not bulky. It’s very similar to the Apple watch just that you can’t answer text on the watch. The battery goes low if you are getting all ur notifications. If you’re getting it for the training feature it only goes up to a half marathon, so if you’re doing a marathon it won’t give you suggestions.

Got this one to replace my old Vivoactive3, disappointed. Watch face do not stay on and it does not turn on with turn of wrist. I will start looking for alternatives.

Broke after falling off my wrist onto concrete and then the insurance refused to replace it, only offering for me to send it in to be repaired (it was so damaged they would have to replace it anyway!) and I wasted over three hundred dollars on both the watch and the insurance.

Packaging is absolutely terrible for the price of this watch. It comes in a tiny cardboard box that barely closes. Looks like a $30 gift upon first glance.

The battery life is so fantastic. I has a model 3 and upgraded a bit which made a huge difference. Pleased with some of the metrics it keeps. I'm by no means super active but I am working on becoming more so. This is the encouragement I needed.

My third iteration of this product line. Purchased to replace aging Vivoactive 3. Significant upgrade with much more health data and improved accuracy, particularly in sleep measurements. Much better in my lap swimming. Hats off to Garmin for making it affordable and significantly improving its usefulness and performance.