Garmin offers plenty of fitness trackers and smartwatches that look the part, but not everyone wants to wear a piece of high-tech gadgetry on a daily basis. Starting at $299.99, Garmin's Vivomove Style is for fashion-forward users who prefer the look of an analog watch, but want the brains of a smart device. It tracks your activities, breathing, and heart rate, and offers insights about your sleep and stress. It supports Garmin Pay, so you can make purchases from your wrist, and it connects to your phone to deliver notifications, calendar alerts, and basic music controls. It doesn't offer as many smarts or fitness features as the Editors' Choice Vivoactive 4, but it nicely balances form and function. 

Design, Features, and Specs 

At first glance, the Vivomove Style looks like a traditional analog watch with real ticking hands. Its stylish design hides a cool secret: You can double tap the domed Corning Gorilla Glass 3 lens to reveal a hidden color touch screen. The watch itself has no physical buttons, so you navigate the interface with taps and swipes (more on that below). 

In terms of sensors, it features an accelerometer, an ambient light sensor, a barometric altimeter, a continuous heart rate monitor, and a pulse oximeter that gauges oxygen saturation in the blood. It tracks your calories burned, distance traveled, floors climbed, heart rate, intensity minutes, sleep, steps, stress level, and more. It even offers Abnormal Heart Rate Alerts, so it will notify you if your heart rate is unusually high or low.

The Vivomove Style has fewer onboard sports apps than the Vivoactive series, and lacks a built-in GPS, compatibility with Connect IQ (Garmin's smartwatch app store), music storage, personalized training plans, and workout animations.

What you lose in features, you gain in design. The Vivomove Style comes in several attractive color options, including light gold aluminum with a blush pink woven nylon band, rose gold aluminum with a white silicone band, silver aluminum with an olive green silicone band, and black aluminum with a black and gray woven nylon band. It's compatible with standard 20mm quick release bands, so you can easily customize the look. Models with the silicone band cost $299.99, while the woven nylon band costs $50 more. Garmin also offers several Vivomove Luxe options starting at $499.99 that feature either an Italian leather or Milanese metal band.

The watch measures less than half an inch thick, has a 42mm aluminum case (the Vivoactive 4 comes in 40mm and 45mm sizes), and weighs either 1.2 or 1.5 ounces, depending on whether you opt for the silicone or woven nylon band, respectively. Garmin sent me the silver aluminum and olive green model for this review. It feels light and comfortable on my wrist, even for sleeping.  

Like the Vivoactive 4, the Vivomove Style has a 5ATM water-resistance rating, meaning it can withstand pressures equivalent to a depth of 164 feet. It's safe for showering, swimming, diving, and snorkeling. 

Compared with the Vivoactive 4's bright, easy-to-read screen, the Vivomove Style's 240-by-240-pixel AMOLED display is dull and a bit hard to read, even indoors. In bright sunlight, it's impossible to read unless you squint and shade it with your other hand. I live in sunny Florida, so this quickly became an issue when tracking outdoor walks and runs. For outdoor activity tracking, I'd opt for the Vivoactive 4. 

In terms of battery life, Garmin says the Vivomove Style lasts up to five days in smartwatch mode and up to an additional week in watch mode. In testing, it went down 50 percent in 48 hours. The Vivoactive 4, meanwhile, lasts up to eight days in smartwatch mode, six hours in GPS mode, or 18 hours in GPS mode without music. 

Setup and Navigation

To get started, you need to download the Garmin Connect app (available for Android and iOS) and follow the instructions to pair it with your phone. If you already have the Garmin Connect app on your phone, just go to More > Garmin Devices > Add Device. Once I did that, it automatically found the Vivomove Style and asked me if I was ready to connect it. You then enter a code on the watch's screen to connect it with the app via Bluetooth. 

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Once that's done, you can create alarms, customize the watch face and widget list, set up menstrual cycle tracking, and Garmin Pay, or skip those steps and do them later. When you get it set up, the watch asks if you want a tour of how to navigate it. 

Navigating the Vivomove Style takes some getting used to. To turn on the hidden touch screen, you can simply lift and rotate your wrist up to your face, or double tap the watch face. In testing, the lift to wake gesture and double tapping were both finicky and didn't always work. 

Swiping left and right lets you access your widgets, including body battery, calendar, floors climbed, heart rate, hydration, intensity minutes, menstrual tracking, music controls, notifications, respiration, status and time, steps, stress, and weather. I detail these features in my Vivoactive 4 review.

To open the main menu, tap and hold the screen. Here, you can access activities, clocks (alarms, countdown timer, and stopwatch), Garmin Pay, heart rate stats, phone options, and settings. You can also swipe down from the touch screen to quickly access Garmin Pay or enable Do Not Disturb mode. 

When you interact with the Vivomove Style's touch screen, the watch hands move in coordination with the graphics. When you swipe to the step count widget, for instance, there's a bar at the top indicating your progress toward your goal, and the watch hands point to where you're at for the day. When viewing the calendar or notifications widgets, the watch hands will move out of the way for easy reading. 

Activity Tracking

To start logging an activity, you hold the touch screen, tap Activities, then scroll through the list until you find what you want to track. By default, the activities listed include Cardio, Run, Strength Training, Walk, Yoga, and Other. In the Garmin Connect app, you can edit this list to add Bike, Elliptical, Pool Swim, Stair Stepper, or Toe-to-Toe (a two-minute step challenge). Note that you can only have a maximum of six activities on your device, and walk and run cannot be disabled. 

Once you select an activity, just double tap the screen to start the timer. When tracking an activity, the Vivomove Style shows your heart rate and how long you've been exercising on the screen. If you need to take a break, or you're ready to stop an activity, double tap the screen again. When walking and running, you can connect the Vivomove Style to your smartphone to record GPS data. 

When you visit the Garmin Connect app, you'll see your latest recorded activity on top. Below that are sections for your Body Battery score, calories burned, heart rate, Pulse Ox data, respiration rate, sleep metrics, step count, and stress level. You can click into each of these sections for charts and more information. The app also shows your metrics for the previous day and the past week.

Comparisons and Conclusions

If you're looking for a capable fitness and sleep tracker that doesn't look like one, the Vivomove Style should be on your shortlist. Design is an important factor when selecting a smartwatch, and the Vivomove Style excels in this area with a beautiful, classic analog appearance and hidden touch screen. But unless you're buying it for its attractive looks, there's no reason to pick the Vivomove Style over the Vivoactive 4. For $50 more, the Vivoactive 4 offers a much brighter and easier to read screen (especially in bright sunlight), more fitness features, built-in GPS, music storage, and support for downloadable apps. And while it doesn't look quite as traditional as the Vivomove Smart, it's still pretty attractive in its own right.