The Garmin Vivomove Trend is finally here, after months of anticipation, and we're here to give you the full lowdown if you're thinking of picking one up. Here at Advnture we'll be testing it very soon, and will bring you a full review once we've put it through its paces.
The Vivomove Trend is a fitness watch that keeps tabs on your daily activity, stress, and sleep to help nudge you towards a healthier lifestyle. As you'd expect from a Garmin watch, it has a variety of activity tracking modes, but this isn't a dedicated sports watch for hardcore runners or triathletes. If that's more your speed, you should take a look at our roundups of the best GPS watches and (if you're on a budget) the best cheap GPS watches.
Instead, the Garmin Vivomove Trend has more in common with a Fitbit – but with a much more traditional look thanks to its hybrid face that combines analog hands with a digital display. Now let's get into the real detail...
Price
The Garmin Vivomove Trend is available to buy now direct from Garmin for $299.99/£279.99. That's a mid-range price for a sports watch, and slightly cheaper than its extra-stylish sibling, the Garmin Vivomove Style.
Design
Like all watches in the Vivomove series, the Garmin Vivomove Trend's distinguishing feature is its hybrid face, which features physical hands set on top of a monochrome LCD display. Although this can't show nearly as much data as a color memory-in-pixel or OLED display, it's fine for the kind of everyday wellness tracking this watch is built for. You're not going to be using it to navigate on backcountry expeditions.
The circular stainless steel case measures 40.4mm in diameter, and is 11.9mm thick. It's fitted with a 20mm wide silicone band with an industry-standard fitting in case you want to switch it out for another material.
The Vivomove Trend comes in four colorways: cream and French gray, peach and ivory (shown above), silver and mist gray, and slate and black.
It's also the first Garmin watch to feature contactless charging, meaning there's no need to plug in that little USB cable any more. It comes with a proprietary clip charger, but is compatible with most Qi charging pads.
Fitness tracking
The Vivomove Trend isn't a fully fledged running watch, so there's no on-board GPS, but it can piggyback on your phone to track your pace and route on runs, walks, and bike rides.
It will, however, keep tabs on your general wellbeing all day and night. Heart rate, floors climbed, steps, stress level, sleep, and even blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) are all tracked as you go about your business. There are also hydration tracking, period tracking, and pregnancy tracking tools should you choose to use them.
All of this data is synced automatically with the Garmin Connect app, where you can see detailed analysis, check trends, and get tips on how to improve your lifestyle. Unlike some apps (we're looking at you, Fitbit) nothing here is locked behind a paywall.
There's a handful of dedicated workout tracking modes, with profiles for indoor and outdoor running, cycling, and pool swimming all preinstalled. Garmin's MoveIQ feature can also detect when you've started certain activities and begin tracking automatically in case you forget,
Pre-launch rumors
We first heard about the Garmin Vivomove Trend in early 2022, when Gadgets&Wearables got hold of a list of warranty information for upcoming Garmin devices, which was accidentally leaked by an authorized retailer. It included the names of most of 2022's releases, including the Garmin Forerunner 255 and Forerunner 955, Garmin Venu Sq 2, and the Garmin Instinct Crossover (then known as the Instinct Analog).
By the end of the year, just two of those names were unaccounted for: the Garmin Austin and the Vivomove Trend (and we suspect that Austin was a codename for the Enduro 2, released in August).
Back in October the Vivomove Trend received the green light from the Federal Communications Commission, and a few days later it was also approved in Singapore.
On January 12, German tech site WinFuture.de shared images that appear to be 3D renders of the Vivomove Trend. We won't post the pictures here for copyright reasons, but you can check them out on WinFuture.
They showed a sports watch with a very similar design to the Vivomove 3, but a few key differences. First of all, the LED display seemed to be sharper and higher resolution this time around. This should make text easier to read, and allow the watch to show more detailed graphs and charts.
The new watch appeared to have a silicone band and a resin case with a stainless steel bezel. There was no sign of physical buttons, and it seemed to come in three colors: all black, rose gold with an ivory band, and soft gold with a beige band (we now know that there are actually four options). Hour markers appeared to be engraved on the bezel, which means there's room on the face for numbers for easier reading at a glance.
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