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The best fitness tracker
By Amy Roberts This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer's guide to the best technology. Read the full article here. Over the course of 60 hours, we surveyed readers, interviewed industry and exercise-physiology experts, walked, ran (and ran some more), slept, grocery-shopped, jumping-jacked, swung kettlebells, and analyzed user experience to determine that the Garmin vívosmart HR is the best fitness tracker. It effectively collects the same data as top competitors from Fitbit and Jawbone but offers a larger, more legible touchscreen and more useful smartphone-notification options, as well as full waterproofing to 50 meters (other models are merely splash-resistant).
Garmin Vivosmart review: where fitness band meets smartwatch
There are fitness trackers and there are smartwatches, but there's only a small number of devices that attempt to be both. The Garmin Vivosmart is one such exception. It's a $170 band that does everything you'd expect a fitness gadget to do: track your steps, calories burned, distance traveled and sleep. In a unique twist, though, it also has an OLED screen showing things like emails, texts, Twitter and Facebook notifications and incoming calls. In essence, it's a full-fledged fitness tracker that also acts like a full-fledged smartwatch. The question is, can it do both jobs well?
Garmin's Vivosmart is part fitness band, part smartwatch
Considering how many damn smartwatches and fitness bands we've seen, it's incredible how few of them manage to combine aspects of both. Sure, there was the Fitbit Force, which was designed to show incoming calls for iPhones, but that was discontinued after a recall. The Samsung Gear Fit and Gear 2 have some fitness features, but you need a Samsung phone to use them, and besides, the step and heart-rate tracking aren't very accurate anyway. You might even remember the Razer Nabu, which won our People's Choice Awards at CES, and promised to display notifications for emails, among other things. But since that still hasn't come out, it's basically a moot point. All of this is to say: There's a wide-open market for fitness trackers that can also do the core job of smartwatches. Enter Garmin. The company just announced the $170 Vivosmart band, a fitness tracker that shows texts, emails, calls, calendar appointments, game notifications and music playback controls. For the time being, at least, it might be the most versatile fitness device you're going to find.
