Garmin 4

Thanks for that. I thought my Vivoactive 4 battery was just shot so I bought a new watch since it was only lasting a few hours. I keep waiting for the Apple Watch to last multiple days so I can leave Garmin.

Garmin's own product webpage highlights the biggest problem with Garmin.[0] They have too many options, with very little distinguishing features. Instead of making hardware to justify the number of models, they cripple watches in various ways using software. For example, on my Vivoactive 4, recording a "Hike" activity is impossible. Instead, I have to record all my hikes as "Walks". They should trim their offerings down to fewer than 10 models instead of the 28 currently listed. 0: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/wearables-smartwatches/?curre...

These plots definitely align with my personal anecdotal experience. I own both a Fitbit Vivo Active 4S and a Garmin VivoSmart 4. In the daytime, as a watch, I much prefer the Garmin, but at night, as a sleep tracker, which is the main thing I want from these watches, I only trust the data from the Fitbit. If I'm concerned about actual total sleep times, I do generally need to edit the Fitbit data in the morning. Over the years, my Fitbit watches have fairly consistently confused idle time sitting on a couch watching videos or lying in bed reading on my phone before or after sleeping as sleep. The data edit tools in the app fortunately make it easy to correct this (I'm not someone who falls asleep with the video playing, so I generally know when I turned off the activity at night and when I woke for the morning). The data during the night, which is what I care about, I've come to trust on Fitbit watches over the years. I can't know if it's precisely accurate, but it's definitely directionally correct (if there's an overall scale factor error or similar from true sleep quality and time numbers I don't really care as the measurements are consistent enough that I can use them and benefit from them). My Garmin I view as a random number generator as far as sleep tracking. My perception is it's probably a bit better about not misclassifying idle time before and after sleep, but not accurate enough to be actually correct, and I have not been able to find any simple data editing featu…

I use a Garmin Vivosmart 4 or a Xiaomi Mi Band (v4 or v5) and simply don't connect it to the smartphone. That gets you access to the data on your wrist, but no log of the data. Great privacy with no data collection. If you want data collection maybe you can find an app that doesn't upload to the cloud or write your own; some fitness tracking apps can talk to a variety of devices and don't use the cloud. The Gadget Bridge web site has a list of which devices are compatible with it: https://github.com/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge They do list the Pebble Steel. I'd try the Mi Band 5. The Vivosmart 4 is somewhat unstable in my experience.