Garmin launches $299 Vivoactive 3 smartwatch with Garmin Pay and new sport profiles, and the $199 Vivosport and $199 Vivomove HR activity trackers
Another $300 smartwatch that wants to be the best high-end fitness device. — Ahead of this year's IFA conference, Garmin announced new additions to its Vivo family of wearables.
Context & Ripple Effects
This launch extends a deliberate climb Garmin began in 2016, when it redesigned the Vivofit band and added an optical heart-rate sensor to the Vivoactive HR, then pushed GPS into the band tier with the Vivosmart HR+ at $219. The Vivoactive 3 is the next rung: a $299 watch that adds Garmin Pay and new sport profiles, flanked by two $199 trackers so the Vivo family now spans band-to-watch price points just ahead of IFA.
The pattern held after this announcement: the same body gained music storage within a year as the Vivoactive 3 Music at the same $299 price, the tracker line picked up pulse-oximetry sleep sensing in the Vivosmart 4, and by 2022 the lineage reached the voice-assistant-and-calling Venu 2 Plus at $450.
First-order effects
- Garmin Pay moves Garmin onto the wrist-payments battleground against Apple Pay and Android Pay at a $299 price point, while the bundled $199 Vivosport and Vivomove HR give retailers a three-tier Vivo shelf for IFA season.
- Buyers choosing between Garmin's own tiers face a sharper trade-off: GPS and heart rate are no longer watch-only features after the Vivosmart HR+, so the Vivoactive 3 must justify its premium through payments and sport profiles.
Second-order effects
- Rival fitness-watch makers are forced to treat contactless payments as table stakes in the sub-$300 category, since Garmin now offers it without Apple or Android phone-brand pricing.
- Garmin's own roadmap shows the follow-on cost of this cadence: within a year it shipped the Vivoactive 3 Music with onboard song storage at the identical $299 price, effectively discounting the original model's value proposition.
Third-order effects
- The recurring annual refresh structure points toward Garmin competing on sensor and software depth rather than hardware novelty — later additions like the Vivosmart 4's pulse-ox sleep tracking and period tracking in Garmin Connect turn the wearable into a subscription-grade health platform.
- If the price-ladder strategy holds, the boundary between 'activity tracker' and 'smartwatch' erodes: by the Venu 2 Plus, Garmin was selling calling and assistants at $450, a category position built on the foundation this 2017 trio established.
The trend: Fitness wearables are converging upward into full smartwatches, with Garmin layering payments, music, and health sensors onto one annually refreshed Vivo platform.