Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsI absolutely love it!
Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2021
I can’t say enough about how excited I am that someone finally made a smart fitness watch for people with tiny wrists! I’ve been wearing Fitbit smartwatches for years, but it’s always bugged me how bulky they look on my arm. See the side-by-side comparison picture of the Fitbit Sense and the Garmin Lily... enough said. So when it felt like time for a change, I just had to try the Lily! And I’m so glad I did. I absolutely adore it. Here’s my quick list of pros and cons after a couple of weeks of wearing it:
Pros:
- GORGEOUS. I can’t stop staring at the beautiful pattern on the lens. I feel like I’m wearing a piece of art on my wrist!
- SO lightweight. I didn’t realize how heavy my old fitness watch (the Fitbit Sense) was until I put on the Lily! I was blown away by how light it is.
- Does everything I need in a smartwatch – can wake me up in the morning with an alarm, provides notifications for texts/calls, tracks fitness activities, and more.
- Garmin has an excellent app that provides very detailed information at no extra cost to the user (unlike Fitbit, where you need a monthly subscription to take advantage of all of the features that watches like the Sense offer). Garmin’s tracking results are a lot more extensive, and their fitness tracking in particular blows Fitbit away. For example, you can track specific movements with Garmin. You can tell it you were doing deadlifts or sit-ups or leg raises and how many reps you did of each – the list of options is huge. It will even auto-populate what muscle groups you worked in strength training. At one point, the exercise recognition feature figured out I was doing push-ups and jumping jacks without me telling it, which was neat!
Cons:
- The Lily has a silent (vibrating) alarm, and if you hit snooze it goes off again 10 minutes later. When it goes off again, it shows your original alarm time rather than the actual time (e.g., if the alarm goes off at 6 am and I hit snooze, it still shows “6 am” when it goes off again despite the actual time being 6:10).
- Because the screen is small (which I love) this means that sometimes the notifications for texts get partially covered up by the options to clear or respond to them. So you kind of have to guess what some words are.
- Doesn’t sync with phone Do Not Disturb or silence settings. If my phone is on DnD or silent, I have to set the watch to be on DnD/silent separately, or it will still vibrate when my phone gets notifications.
- And the vibrations are LOUD. It’s pretty noticeable in a quiet room, so if your phone is blowing up and you’re in a meeting it’s a little awkward. I’m also not sure how good the actual vibration sensation is… Sometimes I feel like I hear it going off more than I feel it.
So there you have it! The Fitbit Sense addresses all of these cons (updating the alarm time after snoozing, more room on the screen to read notifications, syncing with phone Do Not Disturb/silent settings, more subtle vibrations). Fitbit also does better with sleep tracking, and you can use the Fitbit Sense to talk on the phone and send tailored text message responses through voice-to-text (the Lily doesn’t have a microphone, so it can only send a few stock text responses). But despite all of that, I’m glad I switched from the Sense to the Lily. The pros are just so good -- they easily outweigh all of the cons, at least for me. I’ll be sticking with Garmin’s line of smaller watches moving forward!
