Review on Garmin Venu: Rose Gold GPS Smartwatch with Music, Body Energy Monitoring, and Animated Workouts by Phillip Reed

I've been using fitness trackers for a few years, starting with the Fitbit Flex, then Microsoft Band, Microsoft Band 2, Fitbit Ionic and now Garmin Venu. I've always chosen fitness-centric devices more than app-centric smartwatches like the Apple Watch or Samsung Galaxy Watch because I've never seen the appeal of reading the news or navigating a map with a tiny screen on my wrist. . While I like the ability to install apps and add-ons, it's more important to me that the device tracks my sleep, heart rate, steps, and exercise, and that all of those things work well. With that in mind I'm quite happy with my Venu after a few weeks, but there are a few caveats. Pros: - Battery life is at least as good as advertised. With always-on display disabled and sleep-only heart rate tracking enabled, I get 5+ days on a single charge. The lift-to-wake feature is sensitive enough not to be intrusive, but you can also choose to only turn the display on during activities, which is a good compromise between maximum battery life and maximum ease of use. GPS accuracy is generally excellent. This appears to be a marked improvement over the Fitbit Ionic, which was pretty good but tended 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 multiple panels per screen compared to Ionic's more limited choice. - Heart rate accuracy seems excellent. I haven't really done any comparisons with other devices, but the DC Rainmaker benchmarks have shown good results and intuitively I feel they're accurate. I love the fitness-focused features like the automatic step goal (which adjusts the goal based on your previous performance). and Garmin Coach (although I haven't used the latter extensively). It's one of the few touchscreen Garmin devices that I still prefer in terms of usability. Touch screens on fitness equipment can be tricky and cause problems when exercising, especially when it's raining or you're swimming, but Venu's software seems well designed to avoid these problems. Notably, it's not possible to pause or stop an activity from the touchscreen, which is a fairly common issue with Fitbit and Apple Watch. class on the Garmin Connect website and sync it properly with Strava. That's very important to me because two of my biggest annoyances with the Fitbit Ionic were that there was no support for skiing and snowboarding, and that the Fitbit website didn't export activities without GPS data (i.e. such activities couldn't be synced to Strava). .Phone notifications and related data like in the weather widget seem to work reliably. Needless to say, except that the weather app has never failed on my Fitbit Ionic, so it's nice to have a weather widget that does that actually works works now. Third-party apps, widgets and data fields in the Connect IQ Store can add additional functionality. I particularly like the idea of adding custom data fields to inline actions, although I haven't used them yet. Cons: - Price! 400 US -Dollars are pretty expensive, especially when you buy an Apple Watch Series 3 for less than $200 can. Fitbit Ionic is also now $23$0, and while I have plenty of complaints about it, it's still a pretty good watch if you don't mind some of the activity-related downsides mentioned above. [Edit: Aside from Google getting Fitbit, I wouldn't buy their ecosystem.] - No activity on eBike, so you can't tell the difference between regular bike rides and eBike rides on Connect. This can no longer be set later on the Connect website, although it supports many different types of cycling. - No support for open water swimming, although Garmin does support it on other devices with the same GPS chipset, accelerometer, etc. In other words, I don't think there's a reason this watch can't support open water swimming, but Garmin is keeping that feature as a price differentiator. It's annoying that Garmin is doing this, and it seems like an anachronism as Apple keeps releasing new watchOS updates for older devices. Similarly, other Garmin devices have many nice software features like Training Effect, altitude and heat acclimation, etc. that could have been enabled on this device but weren't. I'm going to relax Garmin a bit since they license these features from FirstBeat, so they're probably paying more for the feature, but at least give us the option to pay for that extra functionality without adding another $200 to the Fenix to lose. device would be nice. - Also no widget view supported in Fenix 6 series. Scrolling (swiping) through multiple widgets can be tedious when you're looking for a specific widget. Sleep tracking accuracy is pretty poor. Determining sleep quality is probably more of an art than a science anyway, but Fitbit seems to be doing noticeably better. Likewise, Pulse Ox doesn't match the readings I'm getting from a finger clip device, and "Body Battery" seems pretty much useless. It is not possible to filter notifications only for specific apps. Fitbit is smart in that it only uses calls and texts and maybe a few others by default, and you have to turn on other apps manually, which keeps you from getting dozens of notifications on your wrist. Garmin is either all on or all off. Also, notifications for most apps only show a generic icon based on the app's category and not the actual app icon that Fitbit displays. The Gorilla Glass screen doesn't look very stable. There is already a small scratch on mine, although I have tried very hard not to damage my new toy. ☹ Buy a screen protector. The Connect IQ Store app hasn't worked since I received the watch. The main connect app works but the store doesn't. Luckily, you can get around this by installing apps from the Connect IQ website. Also, although I've said I don't really care about smartwatch apps, the Connect IQ app ecosystem isn't anything special, and many apps have very poor UI design. This might seem like a few "cons" for a 4 star rating, but it's mostly picky. Overall, the Venu looks like an upgrade from my Fitbit Ionic, and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a budget, fitness-focused smartwatch. However, "appropriateness" is relative, and while the Venu is affordable compared to the Fenix or MARQ series, $400 is still a lot of money for a smartwatch. If you're looking for a more in-depth analysis from a more serious athlete, check out DC Rainmaker's impressions (I won't link to it so I don't get caught by the spam filter, but if you read "Garmin Venu with AMOLED display: all that you always wanted to know" find it) or wait for the full review.