Unlike many smartwatches that require a smartphone connection to function optimally, this Garmin smartwatch lets you leave your phone behind while you work out. GPS is built in, and you can store offline music on the watch and play it through your Bluetooth headphones. You can even make payments with Garmin Pay. If you’re looking for a fitness smartwatch, you can’t go wrong with the Garmin Vivoactive 4S. The scope now has a thin metal casing, and the two side buttons are also made of metal. The Vivoactive 4s has an additional side button for lap, back, and menu access. The display itself is a backlit, transflective memory-in-pixel panel that uses technology that allows it to consume less power compared to LCD panels. This is one of the hardware factors that give the Vivoactive 4s up to seven days of battery life. The quality of the display is essentially the same as previous Vivoactive models, so the watch face is always easy to see and can be easily read even when running outdoors in the sun. The Vivoactive 4s is packed with fitness sensors: Accelerometer, gyroscope, altimeter, optical heart rate monitor, integrated GPS/Galileo/GLONASS, pulse oximeter, compass, and a thermometer. Both the heart rate monitor and GPS have been updated with new sensors, so they should be even more accurate and efficient than the sensors in previous Garmin wearables. There’s also storage for music on the Vivoactive 4s, and all Vivoactive 4 smartwatches have built-in music storage as standard. Garmin has significantly improved its devices in terms of music storage over the past year or two. There are many new fitness features on the Vivoactive 4s, but first let’s talk about one that directly impacts battery life: optional all-day pulse oximetry. The pulse oximetry sensor in the Vivoactive 4s allows you to measure the oxygen level in your blood based on the heart rate and respiration data you collect. For most healthy people, a pulse ox reading close to 100 will be displayed in the Garmin Connect app after the pulse ox sensors have collected enough data. Like most wearables on the market, the Vivoactive 4s is not a medical device, but it can capture useful information that the user can share with their doctor, who can then decide if there is a problem that needs to be addressed.
