one of the The biggest pain point with fitness trackers is that each tracker has its own proprietary charger. That’s a serious inconvenience — if you forget your Lightning connector or USB-C charger, you can always borrow one from a friend or find one at a store. But the proprietary Fitbit connector? sorry! I guess you don’t count your steps on that Italian hiking holiday!
So, with an almost mystical reverence, I removed the Vivomove Trend from my wrist and placed it on a Qi charging pad next to my desk. Panting, I leaned over to check the screen. TOLL! Granted, it’s not terribly fast, but it works! Never again will I be stuck on a work trip with an uncharged watch!
Garmin’s latest entry-level hybrid watch is still a bit clunky to operate, but I do like its attractive, streamlined exterior and new charging system. Wireless charging on any Qi charging pad is almost magical. On its own, it largely puts it in the lead.
best of both worlds
Photography: Garmin
If you want to track your fitness without wearing an overly chunky sports watch, you have a few options. Withings makes a tracker that looks as much like an analog watch as possible; Fossil’s Wellness watch packs as many metrics as possible into an analog watch face.
Vivomove Trend gives you the best of both worlds. It’s available in a variety of colors (my tester was a beautiful but slightly dated peach gold with ivory strap). It has a refined 40.4mm case and an analog dial. But when you click on your device in the Garmin Connect app, you can choose up to three complications that appear when you swing the watch toward your face.
This allows for more customization than you might think as some complexities can be combined – I chose the Techie face with the date on top and the steps, battery and floor on the bottom.
To start an activity, check your heart rate, access settings or set a stopwatch or timer, all you have to do is touch the watch face with your fingertip. With a haptic buzz, options pop up as glowing icons. If you tap into the timer, but then realize you want to start an activity, you can swipe back. As a side note, I do wish more trackers included a measly on-off button. (Even analog watches have at least one button!)
The buzz also alerts you when you get a notification or start an activity (you can change the intensity of the buzz, but I didn’t notice a big difference). You can start an activity manually, or turn on automatic activity tracking with Garmin’s Move IQ.
Move IQ is pretty accurate—it does a wild 3-minute sprint from the parking lot to the doctor’s appointment—but if you start an activity manually, you have to double-tap after selecting it to start the activity. Since it connects to GPS via your phone, the walks, bike rides, and runs I tracked matched those of other trackers—unless I forgot to manually start an activity, which happened quite often.
