I’ve tried the Garmin Vivoactive 3 sports watch with Garmin Connect and the Withings Steel HR hybrid watch with Health app. Which is better as a sports watch? I decided a comparison was in order and to share my thoughts in this review! Contains affiliate links. Find out more here.
Over the last year I’ve been trying to get to the gym most week days and was in need of a little push to finish off the Couch 2 5k (I’ve got up to week 7 repeatedly but time, sick kids, school holidays and general life always seems to get in the way).
A friend of mine offered me her old Garmin Vivoactive 3 sports smartwatch; she’s similarly been gifted it and was upgrading to an Apple Watch, and wanted to find it a good home. Although I’d trialled cheap Bluetooth connected pedometers before, a sports smartwatch which measures heart rate and activities was something I’d not considered because they’re fairly expensive (between £150-£300) but who would say no to a free watch? Not me.
The Garmin Vivoactive 3 Smart Sports Watch
The Garmin Vivoactive 3 Sports Watch is a chunky old bit of kit, and not the nicest to look at to be honest. You can change up the strap etc but it’s still larger and not necessarily what I, someone with small wrists, would have chosen. The colour LCD touch screen is not very pretty to look at. However, despite its looks I gave it a go and more or less instantly I fell in love with it.
Much like the very cheap watch/pedometer I’d tried, it delivers notifications with a little buzz from your smart phone to the watch via Bluetooth which means I don’t have to always have my phone right there, even when waiting for important emails. You can read the start of emails and messages, and even send short replies or delete things. It buzzes to alert you to phone calls although, unlike the Apple Watch and some other smart watches (including my daughter’s Xplora XGo2) you can’t answer them through the watch. This is fine, because I’d be hideously embarrassed to do so, even if anyone called me and I actually answered the phone, which they don’t and I don’t.
As my watch is third hand it’s unfair to comment on the battery life, however it lasts 3/4 days no problem with normal use.
What’s good about the Garmin Vivoactive 3?
You can choose the configuration of your watch screen to show at a glance what you want to see – in my case steps, calories burned, battery life and of course the time. The touch screen and scroll buttons at the side make it easy to navigate through and you can see your notifications until you swipe them away if you don’t have time to check them instantly.
It automatically picks up when you’re exercising and asks you whether you want to continue, however you can of course select your chosen exercise and it will record your heart rate and calories burned during your session. It seems to be fairly accurate when measuring distances run (even on the treadmill) which makes me confident that the other measurements are good too, although obviously I can’t be 100% sure!
It measures your steps, but also your heart rate constantly throughout the day whether exercising or not, flights of steps walked up, cumulative weekly intensity minutes and calories burned. After each work out, the Garmin Connect App logs your progress so you can see at a glance how many cycle rides, runs etc you’ve done over a certain period and how many calories you’ve burned.
I never really made the best of the app, but it was user friendly and easy to get to grips with and I liked having all my progress and workouts logged in one place.
Features of the Withings Steel HR hybrid watch
Although I love the Garmin Vivoactive 3, looks-wise it just wasn’t me and I wanted something smaller and more stylish so for Christmas, I opted for the Withings Steel HR which had brilliant reviews. I liked the white face, but it’s also available in black. You can get it in silver or rose gold, and it comes in 36mm and 40mm sizes.
The Withings Steel HR is so much more attractive as a watch than the Garmin will ever be. It’s smaller and more dainty, and much more comfortable to wear. It has real watch hands and a step counter at the bottom, and a very small LCD screen at the top. This shows you your selected notifications (as they arrive; they cannot be accessed once they’ve disappeared), as well as your step count, calories burned, heart rate, distance walked etc. It is not a touch screen but operated via the button on the side which you press quickly to scroll through options, and long press to select.
You can select what you want to see as you scroll through via the Withings Health Mate app, as well as the notifications you want to receive.
The Withings Steel HR does measure your heart rate every half hour and when the HR button is pressed, and consistently during a work out. However, I found it didn’t always work; sometimes it just refused to take the measurements. I moved the watch further down my wrist as suggested but it was still very slow to pick up the heartbeat, although it was accurate when it did so.
With the Garmin Vivoactive I liked looking at how my heart rate changed when walking up hills etc, and the Withings Steel HR wouldn’t show me this unless I put it into sports mode before walking up the hill. I guess this is why the battery is said to last so much longer although after 3 days of very low use (over a weekend, so only one day when the sports mode was in use) it was down to 51% battery. I don’t tend to wear my watch at night, so having to charge it isn’t a big deal for me.
Is the Withings HR any good as a sports watch?
My biggest criticism of the watch is that it doesn’t use this heart rate data to effectively estimate the effectiveness of a work out. Personally I find the estimated calories burned on the Garmin Vivoactive extremely motivating; I can get a sense of how hard I’ve worked in spin class or how much my running is improving.
Despite having the data and the app, the Withings Steel HR just predicts the calories burned off through exercise using a standard formula – 20 minutes of cycling for someone my weight will give me the same calorie output unless I manually change it if I think you worked harder in a session, for instance.
I found this really demotivating – nuts, I know, but after a few months of using the Garmin and having it tell me what a pious person I was being I felt really sad not to have that any more. It also doesn’t add the calories burned up throughout the day; getting to the end of the day having done an hour of high impact exercise to see that you’ve burned off an estimated 1600 calories feels really rubbish, even if you know it’s not true. I have to ask, why bother having the calorie counter on there at all?!
At around £180 full price, it just doesn’t live up to my expectations.
In summary: Withings Steel HR watch v Garmin Vivoactive 3 review
In summary: If you’re after an attractive pedometer which you can use to monitor heart rate occasionally but really your priority is how it looks, then go for the Withings Steel HR.
However, if you want a little more from your sports smart watch and you want to use it to get more fit and more active, then go with the Garmin Vivoactive 3, or some variation of. In terms of fitness tracking there’s no real comparison, it wins hands down.
I shall be sending back the Withings Steel HR (returns permitting) as I don’t feel like it does what I was promised it would, and getting something that’s more similar to the Garmin Vivoactive 3; possibly one of the newer, smaller models like the Vivomove or the Vivoactive 4s.