In December I was luckily enough to get my hands on the Garmin Vivofit.

There has been a lot of talk from the tech industry and we have touched upon the FitBit Collection in an earlier post by Jim.  Garmin will be a familiar brand to a lot of you for their GPS products and are known for good quality products in other areas, but can they make it big in the health band arena?

I already have a Pebble Smart Watch as my main watch, and this can load a number of health apps on to it such as Misfit and I was wondering if another tracking device would be to much, but hey its a gadget and being a geek I thought why the hell not, there is no such thing as to many gadgets are there!

Ok so my quick summary is it doesn’t look much but if I am honest I think its great for a number of reasons, I also knew I liked it when I found myself getting frustrated when I leave it at home.

Here are the main features:

• Step counter and goal setting
• Time (very important for a watch don’t you think?)
• Calorie counter
• Sleep Tracker

All of these will sync with your phone via the Garmin connect app!  I won’t lie to you, I instantly got addicted to the step counter and goal target, if you are inactive for more than an hour a red bar appears and then another segment for each period until its full…. Now this is where the addiction comes in, I don’t want the red bar to appear, so if I have  been at my desk to long I get up and go for a quick walk etc…  I guess this is helping me stay more active by reducing the period of time the red bar appears.

The watch uses information you include through the app such as your height and weight and then adjusts targets to fit you.  The calorie counter works in a similar way based on how active you have been etc based on your height and weight!

I also like the sleep tracker and it can show how good a night sleep you have had.  I have included a couple of examples of the output below.

Overall a great little device if you need some motivation to stay more active as well as keep track of what you are doing!