Garmin VivoActive Sports Watch Review

The Garmin VivoActive is a fitness watch with built in Golf App, which gives you distances to front, back and middle of green. The Garmin VivoActive is an activity tracking watch which we’ve mainly been using for running/hiking. For that purpose it seems to work fine, but for the Golf App, there are some serious issues, at least for golfers in Hong Kong or people visiting Hong Kong thinking they can use the watch as a GPS device.

The first and primary problem is downloading courses. Try downloading either the South, North, or East Course at Kau Sai Chau and see what happens. You’re given a choice of three courses, all named “Kau Sai Chau”, but with no designation as to which course. If you’re like us, the last thing you want to do before teeing off is to be worrying about trying to figure out this kind of stuff. Hong Kong Golf Club isn’t much better. Yes, the Garmin Golf Course database does show Hong Kong Golf Club Old Course and Eden Course, but they then show Hong Kong Golf Club New Course A and Hong Kong Golf Club New Course B. Confusing.

There’s more than 38,000 golf courses worldwide but how many of these have the same flaws and problems as we’ve faced in Hong Kong. The GPS measures layup distances, as well as doglegs, keeps track of what hole you’re on, how many shots you’ve played and it’s even got a round timer. Of course, being an activity tracker, the Garmin VivoActive watches’ built in accelerometer tracks your steps. All this is rendered useless if you don’t know what course to select.

If you’re a weekend hacker or mid to high handicapper the Garmin VivoActive watch will probably do the trick, considering they fix the course names. If you’re a low handicap player who can more often than not hit your irons to 15-20 feet distance wise to the pin, you might be better off going with a dedicated golf rangefinder device, such as the Leupold 4xi2, which we review here.

Emails to Garmin’s customer support were answered, but nothing has been done and their English is poor and they didn’t even understand the problem. Overall, as a Golf Watch, give the Garmin VivoActive a miss and go with a rangefinder.

Update on the Garmin VivoActive: We tried this out at Hong Kong Golf Club Old Course. The course downloads automatically stepping onto the first tee, and you’re away. You can keep track of your score but we were only worried about distances. To see how accurate this device was, we took along our Leopold 4xi2 Rangefinder. First off, the actual hole distances can be up to 30 yards difference than what is on the tee markers. Not a single hole was even close to what the Garmin VivoActive displayed. I suspect this is more of a GPS measuring discrepancy between how Garmin are measuring and how Hong Kong Golf Club measure the distances. Regardless, it’s not that big a of a deal, except on Par 3’s. Measuring to back, front and middle of green is somewhat hard to judge, since it’s difficult to measure exact distances using the Leopold 4xi2, What we do know, is that sometimes when we measured a precise distance to the Pin, the back or front distances given by the Garmin VivoActive were actually more or less than the pin, meaning that those distances were inaccurate.

We compared measurements on probably three quarters of the holes, and most times the Garmin VivoActive distances just didn’t make sense. Again, if you’re a mid to high handicapper who’s not good enough to hit your irons consistent distances, than it probably doesnt matter too much, you want a distance to the middle of the green, and the Garmin VivoActive will give you an estimate. However, for better players, a rangefinder (we recommend the Leopold 4xi2) is going to be much more use and give you so much more confidence it’s not funny.

As a fitness tracker, the Garmin VivoActive does the trick. As a golf watch, mehhh…not for us.