Garmin has announced the Vivoactive 6, the latest in its line of GPS fitness watches. The highlights on the hardware side include a slimmer design and brighter display, while there’s a new software feature that’s been long awaited too.
The Vivoactive 6 launches at $299.99, replacing the Vivoactive 5 which launched for the same price in 2023. It very much continues the story of that older model, offering a broad range of fitness functions, but in a slightly more compact package.
While the design remains pretty much the same as before, it’s now slimmer, with a body that’s 10.9mm thick, and it has also lost a couple of grams in weight. The display remains the same size at 1.2in (or 30.4mm). While not specifying the exact brightness, Garmin says it comes with an “even brighter AMOLED display”, which should be good for daylight visibility.
As is the case for pretty much every Garmin model, it will give you a full range of sleep tracking and activity tracking, with support for more than 80 sports onboard. Pouring through the specs compared to the Vivoactive 5, I spotted that it now supports more advanced running dynamics, so you’ll get the running power feature that was missing from the last watch.
That’s going to give a little more information to those training for running events, on top of the normal metrics that you’d expect.
But the real news here is that Garmin is finally adding a smart wake up alarm. Garmin has been great at tracking your sleep for many years, using its Body Battery feature to give you sense of balance between your activity and your rest. Using Body Battery you can see if you’re fully recovered, whether that’s from an intensive exercise session or an intensive night on the town.
Garmin doesn’t say much about the new smart alarm, but details that it will monitor your sleep stages and wake you up with a soft vibration when you are in a light sleep stage within a pre-defined time window. The idea here is that you aren’t wrenched from a dream state back into the real world which can make you feel awful. Instead, when you’re in a light stage, you’ll be gently woken, so you should feel more refreshed.
The Garmin Vivoactive 6 comes equipped with two buttons and a touch display, syncing your data to Garmin Connect on your phone. The Vivoactive 6 is compatible with Android and iPhone, and offers a range of smartwatch features including music, Garmin Pay, notifications, with Android users able to reply using an on-screen keyboard.
The Garmin Vivoactive 6 will come in four colours – Black/Slate, Bone/Lunar Gold, Jasper Green and Pink Dawn. It will be available to order from April 4.
