Garmin’s Vivoactive 3 Music adds Spotify support for tunes while you tone

By Kelly Hodgkins Published February 21, 2019

Those who rock a Vivoactive 3 Music fitness watch have an exciting new feature to check out: Spotify integration. Announced in October 2018, Spotify first landed on Garmin’s flagship Fenix 5 Plus series of smartwatches. As part of last year’s announcement, the company confirmed Spotify would also be coming to the company’s other music fitness watches, including the Forerunner 645 Music and the Vivoactive 3 Music. Garmin made good on its promise to Forerunner 645 Music owners, rolling out Spotify support for those watches at the end of October. After a few additional months of development, the Spotify app finally is available for the Vivoactive 3 Music.

Owners can download the Spotify app from the Connect IQ store and sync their Spotify premium accounts in just a few simple steps. Start by opening the Connect IQ store on a mobile phone using the Garmin Connect app. Search for Spotify and download the app to the watch. Once you open the app on your watch, you can enter in your Spotify account credentials using your phone and link the fitness watch to the music streaming service.

Recommended Videos

The Spotify app only syncs with Spotify premium accounts, which include offline listening as one of their paid features. Spotify premium account holders can download selected playlists, albums, and podcasts to the watch using Wi-Fi, the Spotify app on their watch, and Garmin Connect on the phone. After the initial setup, no phone is required to listen to music. Once some music is synced over to the watch, owners can connect a pair of wireless earbuds and launch the Spotify app on the watch to access their offline racks. Users can control their music with the play, pause, shuffle, skip, and volume controls on their watches.

This music support is the icing on the cake for what was already a great watch, made even better by this new feature. Released in 2018, the Garmin Vivoactive 3 Music blends serious multisport tracking with lifestyle features such as sleep tracking, music support, and contactless NFC payments via Garmin Pay. To find out more about the Vivoactive 3 Music, read our recent review of the LTE version of Garmin’s popular all-around fitness watch.

Topics

Contributor

Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Mobile

How does Garmin measure stress, and is it really accurate?

Garmin Vivomove Sport dial close up. Credits: Garmin official.

Garmin watches are known for their robust activity tracking, but that's not all these fitness watches can do. Over the years, the company has been adding wellness features to its lineup of watches. These new health-focused metrics allow people to analyze their fitness and identify outside factors affecting their performance. One such factor is stress, which is something Garmin watches actively measures.
But you may be wondering—exactly how does Garmin measure stress? In this article, we break down how Garmin measures stress and delve into the accuracy of this metric. Should you trust your stress score? Read on to find out.

Is Garmin's stress score accurate?