Description
Beautiful. Detailed. Alive. The venu GPS smartwatch features a bright, beautiful display and a battery life of up to five days, so you can spend more time doing the activities you love. Get on-screen, Animated cardio, strength, yoga and Pilates workouts right on your wrist. With the broadest available range of all-day health monitoring features — including respiration tracking, body battery energy monitor, stress and more — venu can show you the full picture of your health in vivid detail. Keep your phone and wallet at home, because this Watch lets you download music for phone-free listening and pay from the wrist Using Garmin Pay contactless payment solution (available for supported cards from participating banks).
From the manufacturer
Garmin Venu
GPS Smartwatch with a Bright, Beautiful Display Built for the Active Lifestyle
- Watch case size 43mm; Fits wrists with a circumference of 125-190 mm
- AMOLED display and up to 5-day battery life in smartwatch mode; up to 6 hours in GPS mode with music
- Keep an eye on your health 24/7 with the broadest available range of all-day health monitoring features
- Easily download music to your watch for phone-free listening
- Record all the ways to move with more than 20 preloaded GPS and indoor sports apps
- Get easy-to-follow, animated workouts right on your watch screen
Body Battery Energy Monitoring
See your body’s energy levels throughout the day, so you can find the best times for activity and rest.
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Smart NotificationsReceive emails, texts and alerts right on your watch when paired with a compatible smartphone. You can even respond to texts if you have an Android phone. |
MusicEasily download songs to your watch, including playlists from your Spotify, Deezer or Amazon Music accounts (subscription may be required). Connect with wireless headphones (sold separately) for phone-free listening. |
Safety and Tracking FeaturesWhile your watch and phone are paired, your location can be sent to your contacts either manually or — during outdoor activities — automatically with built-in incident detection (when paired to a compatible smartphone), if needed. |
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Garmin PayBreeze through checkout lines with Garmin Pay contactless payment solution through participating providers (not all countries and payment networks are eligible). |
Connect IQ StoreAdd personality to your watch by downloading apps, widgets, watch faces and more. It’s easy and — even better — it’s free. |
Animated Workouts and Garmin CoachGet a personal running coach on your wrist, for free, to help you train for your next 5K, 10K or half-marathon. Easy-to-follow, animated cardio, strength, yoga and Pilates workouts come preloaded on the watch, and you can download more from the Garmin Connect app. |
Mitch –
A great fitness-focused smartwatch, but the price is steepI’ve been using fitness trackers for several years now, starting with the Fitbit Flex, then the Microsoft Band, Microsoft Band 2, Fitbit Ionic, and now the Garmin Venu. I always gravitate more towards fitness-focused devices as opposed to app-focused “smartwatches” like the Apple Watch or Samsung Galaxy Watch, because I’ve never really seen the appeal of reading news or navigating a map using a tiny screen on my wrist. While I like the option of installing apps and add-ons, it’s more important to me that the device tracks my sleep, heart rate, steps and workouts, and that it does all of those things well. With that in mind, I’m quite happy with my Venu after a couple weeks of owning it, but there are a few caveats.Pros:- The battery life is at least as good as advertised. With the always on display mode disabled and pulse ox tracking enabled only while sleeping, I’m getting 5+ days on a charge. The raise-to-wake functionality is responsive enough to not be bothersome, but you can also have the display always on during activities only, which provides a good compromise between maximum battery life and maximum ease of use.- GPS accuracy is generally great. It seems to be a noticeable improvement compared to the Fitbit Ionic, which was pretty good but had a tendency to cut corners.- The workout display shows 4 different data fields on each screen, and you can customize the layout, order and number of screens. I haven’t made too many changes yet, but I like having the option, and I definitely like having multiple screens with several fields per screen compared to the Ionic’s rather limited selection.- Heart rate accuracy seems great. I haven’t done any actual comparison against other devices, but DC Rainmaker’s tests showed good results and intuitively it feels accurate to me.- I love the fitness-oriented features like auto step goal (which adjusts the goal based on your previous performance) and Garmin Coach (though I haven’t yet used the latter extensively).- It’s one of the few Garmin devices that has a touch screen, which I still prefer from a usability perspective. Touchscreens on fitness devices can be finnicky and cause problems during activities, especially when it’s raining or you’re swimming, but the Venu software seems well designed to avoid those problems. In particular, there’s no way to pause or stop an activity using the touch screen, which is a semi-common problem on Fitbit and Apple Watch.- The watch has built-in support for lots of different activities, all of which have first-class support on the Garmin Connect website and also sync properly with Strava. This is a big one for me, because two of my biggest annoyances with the Fitbit Ionic were that it lacked support for skiing and snowboarding, and that the Fitbit website will not export activities without GPS data (i.e. heart rate-only activities), meaning such activities could not be synced to Strava.- Phone notifications and connected data, e.g. in the weather widget, seem to work reliably. I shouldn’t even have to mention this, except that on my Fitbit Ionic the weather app never worked, so it’s nice to have a weather widget that actually works now.- Third party apps, widgets and data fields on the Connect IQ store can add additional functionality. I especially like the idea of being able to add custom data fields to built-in activities, although I haven’t used it yet.Cons:- The price! $400 is pretty steep, especially when you can get an Apple Watch series 3 for less than $200. The Fitbit Ionic is also down to $230 now, and although I have a lot of gripes about it, it’s still a pretty good watch if you don’t mind some of the activity-specific shortcomings I mentioned above. [Edit: except now that Google has purchased Fitbit, I would not buy into their ecosystem.]- No eBike activity, so you can’t distinguish between normal bike rides and eBike rides in Connect. You can’t even set this later on the Connect website, even though it supports many different types of cycling.- No open water swimming support, even though Garmin supports this on other devices with the same GPS chipset, accelerometer, etc. In other words, I don’t think there’s any reason this watch couldn’t support open water swimming, but Garmin is withholding the feature as a price differentiator. It’s annoying that Garmin does this, and it feels anachronistic given that Apple always releases new WatchOS updates to older devices.- Similarly, other Garmin devices have a lot of nice software features like training effect, altitude and heat acclimation, etc. which could have been included on this device but weren’t. I’ll cut Garmin a little more slack for this since they’re licensing these features from FirstBeat, so they probably pay more per feature, but at least giving us the option to pay for that extra functionality without dropping another $200+ on a Fenix device would have been nice.- Also no widget glance view which is supported on the Fenix 6 series. Scrolling (swiping) through several widgets can be tedious when you’re looking for a specific one.- Sleep tracking accuracy is fairly poor. Determining sleep quality is probably more of an art than a science anyway, but Fitbit seems to be noticeably better at it. Likewise, Pulse Ox doesn’t match the readings I get from a finger-clip device, and “Body Battery” seems more or less useless.- There is no way to filter notifications to only certain apps. Fitbit is clever about this in that it defaults to only calls and texts and maybe a handful of others, and you have to manually enable other apps, which prevents you from getting dozens of notifications on your wrist. With Garmin, it’s either all on or all off. Also, notifications for most apps just show a generic icon based on the app’s category, rather than the actual app icon, which Fitbit shows.- The “Gorilla Glass” screen doesn’t seem very resilient. Mine already has a small scratch on it even though I’ve been taking extra care not to damage my new toy. ☹ Buy a screen protector.- The Connect IQ Store app has been broken for me ever since I got the watch. The main Connect app works, but not the Store. Luckily you can work around this by installing apps from the Connect IQ website. Also, notwithstanding what I said about not really caring about smartwatch apps, the Connect IQ app ecosystem is nothing to write home about, and a lot of the apps have very poor UI design.That might seem like quite a few “cons” for a 4-star review, but they’re mostly nitpicks. Overall the Venu feels like an upgrade from my Fitbit Ionic, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a fitness-focused smartwatch at a reasonable price point. That said, “reasonable” is relative, and while the Venu is affordable compared to the Fenix or MARQ series, $400 is still quite a bit of money for a smart watch.If you’re looking for a more detailed analysis from a more serious athlete, check out DC Rainmaker’s impressions (I won’t link to it lest I get caught in the spam filter, but if you search for “Garmin Venu with AMOLED Display: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know”, you’ll find it) or wait for his full review.
Amanda Schumacher –
Perfect combo of smart watch and running watchI bought this because I thought I needed an upgrade from my garmin forerunner 230. This version is fashionable and looks smaller on my wrist, which is one thing I was hoping for. Another thing I was VERY interested in was the music feature. I’ve used the music feature for races and it worked flawlessly. I didn’t have my phone with me on those runs and the downloaded music on my watch was perfect! The battery life so far is great, with a full charge before a 5k – using GPS and the music feature – my watch got down to 90% battery life. I’m very satisfied with that! I love this watch and I am so glad I bought it. It’s the perfect combination of smart watch and GPS running watch!
monica –
A great fitness watch!This is my first garmin.I have previously owned fitbits and a samsung gear fit2.I dont usually post reviews but I researched alot to decide on buying this watch so figured I read reviews so much and it helped me so why not do it to help someone eles possibly.I have only had the watch on for the last few days but so far I’m loving it!I’ve used it during multiple workouts including running outside with the GPS and it was accurate!I love how it fits, it’s very light to me. Feels good on my wrist.It also looks beautiful!!Which was a big thing for me in purchasing my next fitness watch.My last one (the fitnit ionic) was definitely not very pretty, so I wanted one I would feel good about wearing 24/7.It also has the garmin coach feature.Which Is great because I am going to be doing my first 1/2 marathon and I know it is going to be great at helping me conquer it!The battery life has been great! That was another big deciding factor for me.I was looking for a watch that I knew I could put it on gps and go running/walking/hiking for a day and not worry about the battery draining too quickly to make it to the end of my workout.I wont have to worry about that with this.(But I also have not listened to music, so maybe with gps and music the battery would drain much faster, I have not tested that yet)I’m hoping it still stays a 5 star for me.I will come back in another couple weeks and update my review.
Lisa –
It Knew I was Sick Before I Did!!I got this to monitor heart rate, breathing, and pulse ox and it did not disappoint. At first I thought the sensors were broken because my vitals were all over the place. I’d be sitting on the couch and my heart rate would jump from 60 to 110 with me not moving a muscle. The pulse ox showed low 80s, the body battery was never above 70 even with a full 10 hours of sleep. My stress number was always high. I was ready to return it because surely it was broken, right? WRONG! It was right on the money. Unbeknownst to me, my body was failing! I was hospitalized a few weeks after purchasing this and wore it my entire stay in the hospital. I had the opportunity to compare vitals every three hours when the nurses recorded them. It was on par with the hospital machines’ readings! This watch is amazing!!! Aside from the damn near precise vital readings, this watch has it all. I’ve been tracking my vitals and exercise since I was discharged. It’s really nice to see progress and based on vitals, I know when I need to take a break. I use it a lot for cycling and love how it tracks the distance and route. It’s nice to see slow spots on my ride so I can avoid them next time. I love the Garmin pay, but at some stores it’s a hit or miss. It’s probably an issue with the store verifone thingy, but just know you should have a backup payment with you. Even on my small, child sized wrist, it’s not overwhelming and looks great. I love everything about this watch and can’t sing its praises enough. You need this watch!!
Amazon Customer –
Inaccurate heart rateBeautiful watch; however the wrist heart rate is way off which makes several of the other stats irrelevant. This is very disappointing for a very expensive watch.
AbbyBReviewing –
I ❤ The VenuPros: The watches AMOLED display is beautiful, clear, bright, and the colours pop (this won me over when deciding between the Venu and the comparable Vivoactive 4 which has a dull transflective display. I have No Regreats at all), its comfortable and light weight to wear I often forget its even on. The Venu looks great on my wrist this Sandstone+Rose Gold combination goes well with everything and looks very classy in my opinion. I have sensitive skin and have had no irritations to this watch or band. The display is easy to read indoors and outdoors in sunlight. The activity tracking is accurate. I like that I can input the amount of water I drink directly on on the Venu. The menstral tracking widget is helpful for tracking your cycle. The sleep tracking is very nice its almost as good as Fitbits. The Venu includes Garmin coach for Free an adaptive running training plan and it’s awesome. No syncing issues. (I had a Fitbit Versa before this and it always had syncing issues). Also, it’s a very user friendly smartwatch.Cons: It’s expensive, battery life is shorter than anticipated I get an average of 4 days (I use GPS+Music for runs 3 times a week, have the display on low brightness, and have always on display, notifications, and pulse ox turned off). Finally the stainless steel bezel scratches/dents easily.Overall I would highly recommend this Garmin Smartwatch to others. (It’s a great upgrade from the Garmin Vivoactive 3 and Fitbit Versa smartwatches I previously owned).If you found this review helpful please click the helpful button below 🙂
Tognetta –
Bom custo beneficioPesquisei bastante antes de comprar e foi o modelo que melhor atendeu ao conceito de smartwatch com funcionalidades focadas em esportes, como é de tradição da Garmin.A qualidade da tela é um nivel acima dosdemais relogios da Garmin (linha Forerunner), apesar de achar que as funcionalidades do relógio não fazem uso de todo o potencial.Um dos pontos mais relevantes foi a questão da bateria, que diferente de smartswatch da Apple e Samsung, dura varios dias. Fiz duas cargas completas: Na primeira vez fiz 3x treinos de 40min em 3 dias (usando GPS) e a bateria chegou em 40%. Na segunda carga completa foram mais 3 dias, usei para 2x 30min e 1x 2h com GPS, bateria em 43%. Obs: Não uso para monitorar sono.Não é possivel atender a chamadas do telefone, somente visualização de notificações quando conectado por bluetooth ao celular. Para quem é usuario premium de apps de musica (Spotify e Deezer) é possivel fazer o download das musicas no relógio, sem necessidade de estar junto do celular, o que facilitar na hora da pratica de exercícios.Uma desvantagem é a loja de apps que basicamente só tem opções de customização de tela.
Juliana –
Amei minha escolha. Estava entre Samsung, Amazfit e Ticwatch. Deixei de comprar Samsung por causa da bateria que dizem durar só 1 dia, o Amazfit não tinha as funções que eu queria e o Ticwatch não achei tela menor, parece ser feito só para homens, mas ele parece ser perfeito.Optei então pelo Garmin e não me arrependo! Bateria tem durado 3 dias, usando normalmente tudo que ele oferece. É lindo e preciso. Armazena minhas músicas pelo Spotify e posso sair pra me exercitar sem o celular. Salva o percurso e compartilha com o Strava. Dá pra personalizar praticamente tudo.
Jim S –
Excellent fitness watch with an incredible range of features and optionsI looked at all the major manufacturers before making this decision, including Apple, Withings, Fitbit, Samsung, and also looked at the extremely broad range of offerings from Garmin. Even though I’ve had a Fitbit for the past 7 years, I settled on this watch based on the following:* Extremely broad range of functions that are customizable (in terms of what is displayed on the watch), including even the ability to customize the watch face – both analog and digital.* Relatively low price* Excellent website which links to the watch and allows a fuller mobile and PC view, including tracking over time* The only Garmin watch with the newest amoled display (similar to the look of Apple watch display), with the ability to have the display always on, and blackout periods when you don’t want it to activate unless you press a button (i.e., in bed when you are sleeping).* GPS which does not depend on a phone – it links to satellites independently* In contrast to Apple and most other brands, the ability to view blood oxygen saturation, thereby showing stats such as VO2 max and spot O2 readings* Measures heart rate very accurately without any other devices required.* Can be configured to monitor body energy level, suggest breaks, display respiration rate, steps, stairs, etc.* I have an average-sized wrist, and at about 43 mm it is just the right size without feeling as though the watch was overpowering my arm.* The watch is extremely light – most of the time I hardly notice that I’m wearing it. I’ve also ordered a 3rd party titanium band with quick-release pins (it takes a 20mm size), for those times when I want a dress look. The watch looks really classy, especially with the titanium band. The band that comes with the watch is extremely comfortable, light, and does not irritate my skin.* The watch is designed to be used for swimming* Depending on what you activate (i.e., I have VO2 readings on all the time), the watch battery can last 3-5 days without a charge.* I use the watch to monitor my sleep patterns, and because I also have it set to monitor blood oxygen saturation, I can tell from the chart next day if I need to be worried about anything (i.e., dropping below 90%).* There are hundreds of specific fitness routines and training routines you can download and load into the watch from Garmin.* The watch can link to Spotify and Amazon music using Bluetooth.I’m really happy with this purchase.
Marianna –
Importante: os controles de volume não funcionam bem pra qualquer fone bluetoothO relógio é muito bom, com ótimas funcionalidades e qualidade Garmin que eu amo!A bateria me surpreendeu. Tiro do pulso somente para tomar banho e sem usar GPS, escutando música durou 1 semana. Usando GPS e escutando música durou cerca de 5 dias.O grande problema pra mim é o controle de volume dos fones. Simplesmente não funciona e só depois de comprar que descobri ser um problema antigo que a Garmin simplesmente não resolve.Os controles de volume funcionam para alguns poucos fones, mas não pra maioria. Então se música é seu forte, já saiba que tem o risco de ter que comprar outro fone bluetooth.O padrão é altíssimo, impossível de usar.Como consegui escutar música: conectei o fone no celular, baixei o volume bastante e ai imediatamente conectei no Garmin. Faço isso TODA vez que quero usar, mas assim que desligo os fones, o Garmin volta o volume para muito alto, então se não tiver o celular por perto, não consigo mais escutar.