Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Product Review: Garmin Vivofit 2

So Jawbone and I have a little bit of bad blood.

I'm on my 4th tracker. I'm such a sucker. I call customer service all indignant and ready to make a scene and then the phone call ends with me agreeing to give them another try. It's embarrassing.

You can read about our history here and here.

Currently, I have the MOVE. I love the little clip action. It's discreet, easy to use, and in the beginning worked perfectly fine. It uses a watch battery which is easy to replace and lasts a reasonably decent amount of time. Well, it says its supposed to last a reasonable amount of time but it lies. Then about 4 weeks ago, the device itself, stopped showing me data. It is supposed to tell time, my steps etc... now it shares NOTHING. It still connects to my phone but now I need to manually put it in sleep mode, which is just aggravating.

bad blood.

I was in the car with my Mom, driving to get some curtains, when she told me she bought some activity thingamajigger. Um. ok. Which one? She had no idea but told me to check QVC on my phone because it was the deal of the day. Turns out it was the Garmin Vivofit 2. They were selling it at a great price, with a bunch of extra bands and she kindly offered to get me one.

picture courtesy of Garmin.com

I have this crippling inability to let go of things. It's not a hoarder situation, I just hate giving up on something. I really, really, really like Jawbone's app. It's so pretty and easy to use. It gives me all the information I need and nothing that I don't. Garmin's app is like Jawbone's uptight, older, over achieving brother. It's dark, and filled with graphs, and tables. It's boring. Efficient but boring. It's the opposite of fun. I wish there was an option for a sparkly, unicorn, glitter Garmin app because I would totally go for that one.

The Vivofit itself is a neat little device. Comfortable to wear and not too difficult to get on with one hand. It gives me all the information I need and even beeps at me when I'm being lazy. Because I am an uber weirdo, I am NOT using it as my running watch because I can't convince myself that my activity tracker can also function as my running watch even though I have no valid reason to back that up. So I'm still wearing a separate watch and carrying my handy dandy little Vivofit (it pops out of the bracelet and easily fits in those tiny little pockets they put in running clothes that I can't find any other use for) in my pocket. 

I tweeted Garmin that they should hire someone to make their app more pretty and then I was horrified when they responded. They asked me to make a formal appeal to their design team and all I'm thinking is how am I going to explain to a bunch of serious athletes that they should make their app as if UniKitty from the LEGO movie was in charge? Not sure how well that would go over.

this is me.
this is the Garmin design team when I tell them their app makes me sad

 
*photos of  happy & angry UniKitty courtesy of Lego

previous post: Year in Review: 2015

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