
I was in a hurry when I used the Vivoactive to pay for a pack of gum at Duane Reade, and using the watch to pay was far faster than digging into my bag to find my wallet and pull out my debit card, especially given how slow chip card transactions have become.īut Garmin Pay doesn't support that many cards at launch, which limits its usefulness. You'll see a photo of your card and its last four digits to make sure you pick the right one. You can store multiple cards in your wallet and choose between them by swiping down.

To actually use Garmin Pay in a store, long press the Vivoactive 3's side button and tap on the wallet icon. The whole process takes just a few minutes. You can add payment details manually or by snapping a photo of your physical card, then verify your card with the bank or credit card issuer. Setting up Garmin Pay in the Garmin Connect smartphone app is fairly easy. You can tell whether a store or restaurant accepts mobile payments if there's an NFC icon on the checkout stand. The company introduced a mobile payment system with the Vivoactive 3 called Garmin Pay so you can pay for items on the go by simply holding your watch near a payment terminal. Like Fitbit and Apple, Garmin wants to make its smartwatches capable of doing more on their own. Both the Ionic and Apple Watch support local song storage, so you can exercise without a phone nearby. You can control song playback from your smartphone using the Vivoactive 3, but if you leave home with just your smartwatch, you'll have to work out in silence. The watch also lacks onboard music storage and has no integration with music apps. Shouldn't a watch with a heart rate sensor be able to figure out that a human isn't wearing the device, let alone sleeping while doing so? The next day, the device reported that I had slept solidly for 9 hours. One night, I forgot to wear the watch, leaving it on a table. The device gets pretty decent battery life - about three days with GPS and heart rate use - which means you can wear the watch overnight, but the sleep-tracking leaves a lot to be desired. Downsides: Sleep-tracking and no songsĭesign and fitness are where Garmin's Vivoactive 3 excels, but it's not a perfect smartwatch. However, I wasn't able to respond to messages right from my wrist, which would be useful. More basic fitness trackers will tell you if you have a text but won't show you the whole thing.

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I liked that the Vivoactive 3 would show me the entirety of a text message or the full text of an alert. Swipe up from the watch face to see an overview of your day, check the weather or view your most recent notifications. 😝 But I’ve got something that might help.Pressing on the watch face reveals a menu from here, you can change your watch face, set an alarm, view your stats and change the watch's settings. But I’m still a Fitbit fan because that’s where all my friends are that I do fitness challenges with.Īre you into fitness? How’s your health? You can’t outlift or outrun an unhealthy gut. I think my favorite thing about my Garmin is that I can wear it while swimming, giving the kids a bath, washing dishes… You know all the things I can’t do while wearing my Fitbit Blaze. I’m a database analyst, so you probably won’t be surprised that I chose a face with all the DATA (Data Lover 🤣). I’ll be wearing both the whole day today too to continue my research 😂. So I slept with my new Vivoactive 3 on 1 wrist and my old Fitbit Blaze on the other to see how they compare.


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Then I found the solution of all solutions… Garmin Express! You download the application to your desktop then hook your Vivoactive 3 up with the power cord to your USB slot and it will sync and make updates to your smart watch that didn’t happen from within the watch menus (I had checked for updates within the watch menu and it had said it was up to date 🤔).Īfter the updates were complete… I had all my watch face options available! 🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼 I found a long thread about things that worked, then didn’t, like rebooting, but I tried that… 3 times already and still couldn’t see the faces🤷🏽♀️. So obviously I scoured the internet to figure out why the faces wouldn’t work. Then I went to apply them and 5 of the 6 had an error 🤦🏽♀️. I was so excited when I saw all the watch faces I could choose from in the Garmin Connect IQ app 😍, so I downloaded 6 of them. So I got a sweet Garmin Vivoactive 3 delivered yesterday from my company… Because… Well… They are awesome and they actually show us they appreciate the hard work that we are doing my rewarding us with gifts to help us on our health and happiness journey.
