Garmin Venu - An in Depth Review and Personal Opinion

Disclaimer: This post tries to be as objective as possible, but it contains personal opinions. You may or may not agree with these opinions and views, and it is up to you to decide what importance do they have for you.

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[UPDATE 2020, August 23rd]: I have my watch since 4 months now. And I settled into a nice daily usage pattern. This also highlighted the excellent battery usage the Venu has. So, here is my latest battery usage, from 100% to 1%. Total time 3 days, 10 hours. 

And here is what features I used in these 3 and a half days. This is quite typical for me nowadays.

- Outdoor activity tracking ~5 hours: biking, running, gardening - all these use GPS

- Swimming tracking ~40m: I've put this separately because swim tracking is especially battery hungry. These 40m of tracking ate up 10% of battery. GPS and HR sensors are working overtime in the water.

- Indoor activity tracking ~5 hours: cooking, cleaning, vacuuming, house repairs - all these do not use GPS but track all other stuff, including heart rate, steps, calories, fluids lost (perspiration), etc.

- SpO2 (blood oxygen saturation) tracking active through the night, from 22:00 to 06:30 hours.

- Heart rate monitor active 24/7

- Automatic activity detection active

I am very pleased that with all these features running, and after tracking so many activities, the watch still last a solid 3 days. And, if you wake up in the morning with only 15% battery, and you have no time to charge the watch before going to work, you can still rest assured that it will resist for the next 8-10 hours ... unless, of course, your work implies swimming ;)

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[UPDATE 2020, July 18]: After the 4.90 software update, the loading time of most IQ Store 3rd party watch faces is very fast. Some are as fast as built-in watch faces, other more complex ones load at about 800-1000 ms. In any case, the 2-5 seconds waiting is fixed for even the most complex watch faces.

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Original post below:

After being an avid Samsung fan for years, I've got disappointed by my Galaxy Watch because of its hardware quality and lack of software improvements I was interested in. In less than one and a half years it had all its internal components serviced in warranty because it just broke. It had its display replaced, then motherboard and battery. To be honest, I never had a Samsung device that I had to send back for so extensive repairs after such a short period of use.

Let's clarify some things before going any further.

• Garmin Venu is an activity and fitness tracker with smartwatch features. It is not a smartwatch.
• Samsung Galaxy Watch is a smartwatch with fitness and activity tracking features. It is not a fitness tracker regardless of what Samsung is claiming.

Now, you may say OK, OK ... but what's the difference?

Well the difference is that the Galaxy Watch has powerful CPU, smooth animations, microphone, speakers, a virtual keyboard, and other gadget like features. It also has a very user friendly UI that is intuitive, a rotating bezel, and so on. And in this area, it is a great product.

However, when it comes to activity and fitness tracking, the Galaxy Watch is light years behind the Garmin Venu. Samsung is probably the best between other smartwatches when it comes to activity tracking (I don't know about Apple, sorry), but it is still a smartwatch that tries to do fitness tracking, nothing more.

The Garmin Venu has a slower CPU, laggy animations, basic user interface. They barely did their first steps in the smartwatch world. The OLED display is visually great. Watch faces are plentiful in their market. However all watch faces are very slow, except the preloaded ones. Those are optimized for the Venu and they work really well. You can even set what extra data fields to show. However the these preloaded watch faces are fairly basic. If you are into data galore and you want a fancy watch face, you will find one. Even Garmin has some cool ones. However be prepared to wait 2-5 seconds from the moment you rise your wrist until the watch face appears.

Now, let's talk about activity tracking and fitness... This is where the Garmin Venu really shines.

1. Garmin made great strides to offer you all the statistics and graphics you can imagine. And they made sure that you can access them from all your devices: watch, phone, and PC. Maybe I am an old school guy, but I prefer to analyze the data and check statistics and graphs on a large computer display. Garmin Connect web interface is amazing. Samsung didn't even bother to do something similar, and Google Fit retired their web interface. They are smartphone companies and they want you to buy both their phones and watches. Garmin doesn't care. They don't have phones. They want to offer you the maximum they can using any phone or PC.
   
   Not only the web interface lets you see all your stats in numbers or graphs, but it also lets you create custom dashboards with cards of your choosing. And believe you have an incredible number of cards available. I have two dashboards, each with about 24 different cards.
2. Regardless of how active are you during a day, I consider hydration an important aspect of my life. The Garmin Venu offers hydration targets and notifications. And not just a static target. More specifically you can select a base value that will increase in accordance to your activities. For example my base target is 2.5 litres of water per day. When I do an activity, the Garmin Venu will also estimate how much liquid I loose due to perspiration (sweating), and adjust my target for the current day. And one very important thing is that the watch notifies you to drink some water when you are falling behind. It is an automatic algorithm. I don't know how it works, but I observed that if I drink more frequently, it will notify me less. So, it does some adjustments. And adding hydration to your profile is very easy from the watch. There is a dedicated widget for it. Because it is probably the most frequently used one for me, I've set it to be the first widget when I swipe down. This way adding to my hydration is very easy and fast: swipe down, touch "+" sign. Done in half a second. Unfortunately, Samsung Galaxy Watch and its predecessors never adjusted your daily goal. I requested this feature about 5 years ago, but never got an answer or an implementation. So, big plus to Garmin at this feature.
3. Training plans by actual athletes. This is really cool. I tried to form a habit of running with my Galaxy Watch, but it was not a pleasant experience. There are some programs in Samsung Health, but they are very basic and general. I never could find one that fits me. They were either too easy, or too hard. With Garmin Connect and the Venu watch, I could actually select a trainer who is an Olympic athlete. And the workouts are tailored to each individual. I am not saying that the person is tailoring it to everyone, but rather at the beginning you do some baseline runs and some algorithm at Garmin adjusts the workouts defined by the athlete to your capabilities. After about 3 weeks I find that each workout is somewhere between medium-to-hard difficulty. Every week, the last workout is one you are encouraged to do at your own pace and I suspect it serves as a baseline for the next week's workout targets. This special workout usually has a distance target, but no pace or time target. In case there is bad weather, you can reschedule in your calendar the workouts. Or if you get sick, you can pause the whole training plan and resume after you get well again. Ah, and I forgot to mention, these training plans are free, no extra payment needed.
4. And with the Garmin watches in general, and the Venu watch in particular, you can track just about any activity you are doing. Some activity trackers are made by 3rd party developers and they may cost money. I personally prefer the activity tracking apps by a developer called fbbbrown (https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/developer/4ca4351d-f24c-40e0-bc3e-b187972a7526/apps) For an about $5 yearly subscription you get access to all his apps. And then you can track almost any activity from gardening to shopping through kick-scootering and snow shoveling or vacuum cleaning.
   
   Of course the Garmin Venu comes preloaded with about 20-30 activity trackers by Garmin. So you are covered for most of the basic stuff like biking, running, walking and indoor fitness exercises.
5.  OK. So, once in a while you just need to figure out the direction by compass. I usually need a compass once a year or so. If you do a lot of hiking, you may need it more frequently. It is not something deal breaking or extraordinary, but it is comforting to know that there is a compass on your wrist all the time.
6. Now, let's take a rest. Sleep tracking is something very cool to have. While the Samsung Galaxy Watch can automatically determine when you go to sleep, the tracking is not very precise. Sometimes it was saying I am asleep when I was just stationary, reading a book or something similar. And when I was asleep, the data was OK, but not extraordinary. The Venu monitors much more. For example blood oxygen saturation, and body battery recharge. These are great pluses. On the minus side, the Venu does not automatically detect sleep outside of a specified time interval. So, for example I have my sleep interval set from hours 22 to 7. If I do a nap at hours 14, it will not register it. But still, it will sense that you are stationary with a low heartbeat and the body battery will stay flat or even increase. If I go to sleep at 22:30, that is OK, it will detect it correctly and set sleep time from 22:30. If I sleep until 8, one hour outside of the target interval, that is OK as well. It will detect it correctly. However, I think the blood OX saturation monitoring will stop at 7 in the morning.
7. So, I mentioned body battery. What is it? It is an estimation of how much energy you have left in your body. And to my surprise, it is quite accurate. When I feel energized and rested and I check the body battery, it shows a value above 50%. When I feel tired and I check it, it is usually below 30%. It is also very helpful to follow during the day and check when you need to rest. Sometime I don't realize I did an activity that consumed quite a lot of energy and I need a few minutes of rest. There are also suggestions after each day regarding your body battery. For example it may say you didn't rest enough, or that you rested very well, or that you had a good rhythm of charge/discharge. The energy consumption takes into account a lot of factors like heart rate, stress level, activities, and so on. For example I can be stationary for half a day but very stressed out and my body battery will go down a lot.
8. Of course the watch has some automatic activity detection. However it is limited to walking and running. Of these two, running is useless because you most probably want to start a running workout or training plan manually anyway. Samsung has biking detection, which works fairly well, but if you are pushing anything else like on a kick scooter or lawn mowing machine, it will misfire and record it as cycling. However, cycling auto detection would have been nice on the Garmin Venu, even though I prefer to start it manually and have my cycling workouts planned and predefined.
9. And if you are into biking or any other sport for witch Garmin has extra sensors, these can be added directly to the watch. For example cadence sensor for biking, or speed sensors, or heart rate sensor (if you want something more precise than the wrist based watch), and so on. Of course there are other accessories as well. I am really tempted to buy a Garmin Edge 830 for my bike. (https://buy.garmin.com/ro-RO/RO/p/621232) Sensor can then be pared either with the watch or with Edge. I am not yet sure how workouts are registered when for example speed and cadence is with the Edge and pulse with the Watch. I guess Garmin's ANT+ or broadcast features can be used to send these kind of data between your devices. 
10. And finally let's talk about software. So far, in one month I had about 3-4 software updates. The watch came with an older software version, and the first update took a very long time to transfer to the watch. So be patient. It can take hours for Garmin Connect (the android companion app) to send the update to your watch. The more frequent, smaller updates pop up quickly on the watch. I don't know how long it takes to transfer, I just update when I am notified. These frequent updates give me a feeling of security. Garmin seems to be a company that does actively develop and invest a lot into software. The watch firmware, the Garmin Connect Android app, the web interface, the all look great and work well. Of course, some people have issues. Of course it doesn't work perfectly for everybody. Of course there is always room for improvement. But when you compare this with other vendors, like Samsung, or Apple, or Huawei, or any smartwatch vendor, you will get maybe a couple of updates per year for a couple of years. I remember I was amazed and happy that Samsung pushed an update to my Galaxy Watch after a year with features backported from Galaxy Active. Same was true with my Samsung S2 watch ... but man ... they pushed these updated after years, and labeled them as "value packs". Garmin seems to have a different approach and I applaud it. And there is also an app store, called IQ Store, which is full of useful apps. Most of them are free, and the few really great ones are payed. Prices however are very low. I mean the extra tracking apps from the developer I mentioned above cost $5/year. C'mon ... there are watch faces more expensive on Samsung Galaxy Store. Ah ... and you DO NOT have to install the IQ Store Android app on your phone. From Garmin Connect you can go to the IQ Store webpage and install apps from there. Heck, they even have web version of their IQ Store you can access on a PC and install apps and widgets from your PC directly into your watch (similar to how you install Android apps from web Google Play Store into your phone).

Conclusion: I personally consider Garmin Venu a superior product overall compared to Samsung Galaxy Watch and other smartwatches. I don't say one is better than the other, but certainly the Garmin Venu fits my needs way better than any smartwatch currently available on the market. I especially appreciate activity tracking, sensor precision, long battery life, frequent updates. Other may appreciate different aspects of a watch, and they will choose Samsung, Apple, Huawei or others. That is perfectly fine.

All I wanted to do with this article is to highlight the pluses and minuses of the Garmin Venu compared to Smartwatches in general, and Samsung in particular.

Neither is better or worse than the other. They are different products, with different goals, targeting different people.

I hope this article will help you choose the one that best fits you.