Review on Garmin Venu: Gold GPS Smartwatch with Bright Touchscreen Display, Music, Body Energy Monitoring, Animated Workouts, Pulse Ox Sensor and More – Black Band by Siu Li ᠌

Name: Garmin Venu: Gold GPS Smartwatch with Bright Touchscreen Display, Music, Body Energy Monitoring, Animated Workouts, Pulse Ox Sensor and More – Black Band
Item: Garmin Venu: Gold GPS Smartwatch with Bright Touchscreen Display, Music, Body Energy Monitoring, Animated Workouts, Pulse Ox Sensor and More – Black Band
Rating: 1

October 08, 2022

Terrible quality, disappointed with the purchase.

Surprised by the large number of rave reviews, so I decided to leave a negative review to warn potential buyers from possible disappointment from a not the cheapest fitness tracker with a claim to a smart watch with a poor-quality function for determining heart rate during workouts.

For me, getting a Venu in 2022 seems very questionable in terms of price / benefit.

1. If you need a smartwatch with the ability of an amateur fitness tracker, it is much more reasonable to buy an Apple Watch.
2. If you want a semi-professional fitness tracker on your wrist for serious workouts, given the frankly poor performance of the heart rate function, Venu looks like a very dubious purchase. It will be fine in conjunction with a high-quality chest strap like Polar H10, but the chest strap can be connected to the same Apple Watch or a large number of other smartwatches or fitness trackers.

I would be glad if in the comments Venu users share descriptions of Venu use cases in which it shows its unique features and provides some visible advantages over alternatives.
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Pros

Perhaps this is really the most similar product from Garmin to a smart watch. Perhaps the most successful from this point of view in their product line. Users have already left a lot of rave reviews before me - you can read about the merits of Venu in other reviews. Yes, battery. Yes, the screen (although, sorry, compared to the Apple Watch, the Venu's screen seems like baby talk), yes, hypometry, yes, the stress detection function and related alerts, yes, this is a cool feature of the watch, but . When one of the key functions of a fitness tracker, namely the determination of heart rate during training, actually does not work correctly, and it will work normally only in pair with an additional heart rate sensor (for example, a chest strap), the joy of using this expensive device is greatly reduced. Keep this in mind when making a purchase decision!

Cons

The function of determining the heart rate during training does not just work badly, it is terrible. Heart rate is determined INCORRECTLY. Details can be found on the Garmin Venu forum. I have been using the watch for more than a month, during this time the watch received 5-7 different firmware ates, the model itself was released in September 2022, it has been on the market for more than 9 months, but the function for determining heart rate during training did not work well, it remains the same. In this regard, the question arises, why is this caused: by the complete sloppiness of the manufacturer, the inability to correct the heart rate at the firmware level without destroying other Venu functions, or are unrecoverable at the firmware level by errors in the heart rate sensor in Venu?