Hello I just received a Garmin vivoactive 5 on Christmas and was very excited. One of the features that I was really excited about was the battery life, but so far very disappointed. my battery doesn't last more than 24 hours! I've tried all of the things to do, drained the battery entirely and cleaned the ports and no success!

This watch is a step up over the Garmin Vivoactive 4. I own both the Vivoactive 4 and the Vivoactive 5. The Vivoactive 5 has a clearer display and the battery stays charged much longer than my vivoactive 4. I only get about two days of charge with the vivoactive 4. The Vivoactive 5 gives me eight days before I need to charge again. I like the Vivoactive 5 very much.

Mine works great, for the most part. It does have a habit of coming out of sync with Gamin Connect though. This last time it took forever to get it back in sync. Now, every time I happen to walk about 25 feet from my phone it vibrates and sends a message, "Phone Disconnected." And when I walk back within that range, it sends another message, "Phone reconnected." This has become rather annoying.

# Garmin vívoactive 5: Great Fitness Watch, Terrible Sleep Tracker ## Rating: 2/5 for Sleep Tracking I’ve been using the Garmin vívoactive 5 for sleep tracking over several weeks, and while it’s a solid fitness watch, the sleep tracking is fundamentally unreliable. If accurate sleep data matters to you, look elsewhere. ## Major Sleep Tracking Failures ### 1. **Completely Misses Sleep Periods When You Change Locations** The watch frequently fails to track entire sleep sessions if you move to a different bed or room mid-night. Multiple times, I woke up in the middle of the night, moved to a different bedroom, went back to sleep for 2-3 hours, and the Garmin simply stopped tracking—pretending I was awake the entire time. This isn’t a minor glitch; it’s a fundamental flaw that makes the data useless for anyone dealing with fragmented sleep. ### 2. **Cannot Distinguish Between Sleep and Watching TV** The watch regularly mistakes lying still on the couch watching TV for sleep. On multiple occasions, it logged 1-2 hours of “sleep” that was actually me lying down watching Stranger Things or other shows. If the device can’t tell the difference between unconscious sleep and conscious TV watching, what’s the point? ### 3. **Fails When You Remove the Watch** If you take the watch off during the night (for a shower, for example), it ends the sleep session entirely. No recovery, no second tracking period—just missing data. This happened multiple times and makes the watch unusable for anyone who might need to remove it briefly during the night. ### 4. **Co-Sleeping Interference** When my toddler slept in bed with me, the watch’s tracking became even less reliable. Movement from another person seems to confuse it, leading to either missed sleep periods or wildly inaccurate wake time calculations. ### 5. **Inconsistent Data Accuracy** Comparing the Garmin’s data to my actual sleep experience revealed huge discrepancies: - **Dec 14**: Watch showed 3h 45m of sleep ending at 3:26 AM. Reality: I was awake 2:30-6:00 AM (3.5 hours), then slept until 8:30 AM. The watch missed an entire sleep period. - **Dec 15**: Watch claimed I went to bed at 10:51 PM. Reality: I was watching TV until midnight. - **Dec 17**: Watch showed no data at all despite wearing it all night. When your sleep tracker can’t even get the basic start/end times right, the detailed sleep stage data (deep/light/REM) is meaningless. ## What Actually Works To be fair, the watch does work reasonably well when: - You sleep in the same bed all night - You don’t remove the watch at any point of the night and reapply it - You’re sleeping alone - You go straight from awake to bed (no TV time) In these ideal conditions, the sleep stage breakdown seems plausible, and the efficiency calculations are probably in the ballpark. But who has perfect sleep conditions every single night? ## The Bigger Problem The fundamental issue is that the Garmin treats sleep tracking as a simple motion + heart rate algorithm. It has no way to verify whether you’re actually asleep or just lying still. It can’t handle anything outside its narrow assumptions about how sleep “should” look. For someone trying to address chronic sleep issues—the exact use case where accurate tracking matters most—these failures make the watch actively unhelpful. You can’t identify patterns or measure progress when the data itself is fiction. ## Bottom Line **Buy this watch if:** You want a fitness tracker with decent battery life and you only care about general sleep trends (e.g., “I usually sleep 7 hours”). **Don’t buy this watch if:** You need accurate sleep data for medical reasons, sleep therapy, or tracking actual sleep patterns. The tracking is too unreliable to be useful for serious sleep ----- **Tested with:** Garmin vívoactive 5 **Testing period:** December 2024 (2+ weeks of nightly use and external journaling) **Use case:** Sleep restriction therapy for chronic middle-of-night insomnia​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

My second vivoactive with a break in the middle for 2 apple watches. Garmin charges once a week with GPS activity tracking having the greatest toll vs apple where i’d get 36 hours between charges. Decided to go back to Garmin after a multi-day hike with my apple requiring me to drag a battery pack along and never getting more than 10 miles of tracking before battery died. Don’t love the garmin user interface and snow sports tracking is questionable having to manually mark runs. I’ll use apple for snow sports but garmin for the rest. Fortunately i’m able to share and merge data between the 2 devices.

I love all the ways to track my activities on the watch and on the app on my cell phone. There so many ways to track many different activities, more than I will be able to use. But for many people it can be wonderful tool for real active individuals. I had a vivoactive 3 watch for many years before I decided to upgrade to this new vivoactive 5, GREAT move. I liked mine so much that I got the same watch for my wife. It has been very great for us to share the data we are gathering on our health.

I've been wearing for a month & have been learning something new everyday. Battery life is the best feature as it replaced my much loved Viactve 3 which could no longer hold a charge long enough to complete 4 hour activity. Sleep score/coach & reminders to get active are most useful in addition to body battery score.

I’ve had this watch for over two weeks now and it easily out does my Apple Watch hands over fist. Yes it doesn’t have all of the fitness activities the Apple Watch has, but it by far more accurate and more reliable. I’m glad I bought this watch and slowly getting away from the Apple eco system.

It’s been almost 1-1/2 years since I bought this, and I’m still happy with my purchase! I bought this because I wanted to track my swimming (I’m a biker and love tracking stats, but I needed something that worked in the water). I love how it also tracks my sleep and rest, had many options for sports, and can be paired with my phone )no, thanks; I love being able to disconnect). This watch is much less than many of the other smartwatches out there and has everything (and more) that I need! (Keep in mind my photo is of a watch that has gone through a lot since I bought it, so a few scratches—but I still love it!)

This is a nice watch for a wide variety of people. I'm not into sports but it works just fine for my focus on health tracking. It gives me enough depth for sleep and daily stats to be very useful. I think it would be useful for people into sports too.