Garmin Vivosmart HR with Heart Rate Sensor Launched at $149.99

Garmin, a top GPS consumer products company has announced the upgrade to its smart band, Vivosmart. As the name suggests the new Vivosmart HR houses a heart rate sensor to calculate your heart beat over the day. Priced marginally at $149.99, the combination of fitness band and smartwatch is available in three colors and two sizes. A black variant would be available in two sizes; regular and X-large while the remaining two colors would be available in only regular size, the colors are Imperial Purple and Midnight Blue.

The pre-orders for the device start from today while they would be exclusive to the offline and online store of Best Buy in the United States and Canada from November 1. The additional online and offline availability starts from next year in January.

Talking further about the new features in the smart band, it also incorporates Garmin’s Elevate wrist heart rate technology that allows a full suite of smart notifications as well. Sporting an always-on high-resolution display, the company didn’t share the exact resolution, the wearable would allow you to review your progress at any day of time as you don’t have to launch the app on your mobile to see stats.

A company is calling it a sleek band as it is lightweight and comfortable to wear all day. The battery is claimed to be up to five days, which isn’t exactly the case with other smartbands out there, such as Fitbit Charge HR and Jawbone UP3. But we don’t know whether it would give that claimed battery life.

With 50 ATM water rating, the users can wear it almost anywhere, which is suitable for swimming, water rafting, and even fishing. Though, we’ll not recommend you take it to shower and dive into swimming pool with it as it might not withstand the pressure.

The focus here being the heart rate monitoring, it will measure your heartbeat 24/7 and thus give you feedback based on your daily activity, calories burned, works outs and even sleep. Talking about the sleep tracking, the Garmin Vivosmart HR introduces the automatic sleep tracking and automatic goals.

Other operations like displaying texts, emails, calls, calendar and social media alerts from the phone when connected via Bluetooth. Moreover, you could also control the music using the Vivosmart HR band. It would be directly competing with the likes of Fitbit Charge HR, Jawbone UP4 and recently announced Polar A360, which might be costlier than Vivosmart HR but has more battery life to offer.