Venu Garmin, GPS Smartwatch

9 reviews for Venu Garmin, GPS Smartwatch

1. 

   Rated 5 out of 5

   Richard Jett – March 24, 2020

   UPDATED REVIEW (after 1 month of use):I received the watch on 12/16/19. As of today, 2/5/20, I still love this watch. It’s exactly what I was hoping for; no disappointment or regrets.Great Battery Life:— Depending on how you use the watch, you can get a week’s worth of use out of it before charging.— I used to wear the watch every night to capture sleep data, but I have a pretty consistent pattern of sleep. So after a couple weeks, I actually started turning the watch off at night while I’m sleeping to conserve battery life.— I only use the heart rate monitor right before, during, and right after workouts. Otherwise, I keep it off.— If you play music straight from your watch, it drains the battery fairly quickly. As an example, during a 45 min run outside, I had GPS on, heart rate on, and I was playing music straight from the watch. Within that 45 min span, my battery dropped by 12%. If I just use GPS and heart rate, the battery might only drop by about 3% during that same 45 min span. So, if I run inside on a treadmill, I’ll just play music from my phone via bluetooth. If I run outside, I’ll leave my phone at home and will use the music I downloaded to the watch.— You can decide which notifications you want to appear. I only turned on the notifications that I deem important (i.e. Text Messages, phone calls) and kept the rest turned off. I’m using this watch to track my fitness, not to keep updated about Facebook or anything of that nature.— Keep in mind that everyone’s experience will be different. I can regulary get 5 – 7 days of battery life, but someone else may only get 1 or 2 days. It’s all about how you use the watch.Fitness Tracking/Virtual Coach/Garmin Dashboard:— The Garmin Dashboard (app) is pretty sleek and it’s easy to see your workout data and steps.— I don’t know any other Garmin users, but the Garmin Dashboard has a weekly step challenge that puts you in a group with other Garmin users based on your level of activity. I started at the 30k steps per week challenge group and am now in the 70k steps per week challenge group. It’s nice having a little friendly competition with people I don’t know.— I just got started back into running again. I’m using the virtual coach to get myself ready for a 5k in March. Out of all the other virtual coaches I’ve tried to use, this has been the best experience. After I entered some personal data, I got to pick between 3 different coaches. Each coach had a bio and explained their approach to the training plan. The coach I selected has me running 3 days per week. Each workout is different. I’ve done Run/Walk, Speed Repeats, Hill Repeats, the Magic Mile, Drill Workouts, etc. After 7 weeks of a 13 week training plan, my average pace has dropped dramatically and I am on pace to reach my goal of running a 5k in 28 mins or less. It’s been so easy to follow and instructions are provided for each type of workout (job aids and/or videos).— I like that you can only start and stop your activity by pushing the buttons on the side of the watch even though it has a touchscreen. This just means that if I accidentally bump the watch face while running, it won’t stop my run. A previous watch I owned from a different company would only allow you to start/stop activities from the watch face. It was a horrible experience. I’m glad Garmin did not adopt that approach.— The GPS is accurate from what I’ve seen.— I’m sure the step count isn’t perfect, but it gives you a good idea of how active you were for the day.— You can sync your activity with Strava and Nike Plus. After my run is over, as long as I’m near my phone, the activity will sync automatically.Notifications:— The notifications appear immediately as expected and they are easy to dismiss or remove.— If I have my bluetooth turned on, I can answer the phone from my watch.Music:— I have an Amazon Music account, and Amazon syncs up with the Gamin Venue. Any song that I download to my playlist on Amazon will sync over to the watch. It’s a seamless process.— You cannot stream music from apps like Pandora. But, if you have mp3 files of your music, you can download those to your watch. I have an iTunes account. I pulled the mp3 files from some of the songs I purchased and downloaded them to my watch. Easy process.CONS:— The one piece of negative feedback that I have is that you CANNOT manually pause your workout. There is an AutoPause feature, but it doesn’t work that great. I would rather be able to pause on my own, but there’s no option for it. The top right button on the watch starts and stops your activity. The bottom right button is your Lap button. I’m hoping Garmin does a firmware update in the future that enables manual pausing during activities.— This used to be a con, but was fixed by Garmin in January 2020. There was an issue with the heart rate monitor. If you turned it off, it wouldn’t actually go off. It kept running. Instead, you had to restart the watch every time you wanted to turn off the heart rate monitor. But, as mentioned before, Garmin fixed this in January 2020. I can now turn off the heart rate monitor without restarting the watch.I am glad I decided to purchase the Garmin Venue. It looks good on my wrist, it has solid performance, and it doesn’t lag like other watches I’ve seen. I’m very happy with the purchase._____________________________________________________________________________________INITIAL REVIEW:There’s a lot to like about the Garmin Venue. I received the watch on a Monday. It had roughly 65% battery on it out of the box. I didn’t have to charge it until that Friday. And it still had 20% battery when I decided to charge it. I ran 2 days on the treadmill (40 mins on each run) using the run tracker. I used the HR monitor every night while sleeping and sporadically during the day. Yet, the battery didn’t lose much power. The only thing I found that really drains the battery is playing music from the watch. I’m really loving the battery life!The Venue resembles a normal watch for the most part. This is something I was looking for in a smartwatch. I didn’t want something “boxy”. It’s lightweight and looks normal on my wrist. It’s not bulky, nor is it tiny.The tracking info seems to work as intended. I don’t need it to be exact; it just needs to give me a rough idea of how I’m doing each day. Plus, it syncs easily with Strava and/or Nike Plus.Bluetooth is easy to connect. Notifications from my phone pop up immediately. I have no complaints at all about this smartwatch.If I remember, I’ll stop back after a month or two of use to give an updated review.

2. 

   Rated 5 out of 5

   Kathy – March 25, 2020

   I like the tracking. Still learning all the features. Very easy to set up.

3. 

   Rated 5 out of 5

   C Ducky – April 17, 2020

   It is the one of the greatest product in Garmin watch. Many first new-added functions are in this watch in that age such as OLED display. Although it is the old product nowadays, it still works well for my expectation with this budget low price. It is awesome.

4. 

   Rated 5 out of 5

   evelyn zambrano – June 27, 2020

   El reloj es bueno la batería dura bastante 3 o 4 días depende de su uso, es de buena calidad, estoy contenta con el producto llegó rápido

5. 

   Rated 5 out of 5

   Elizabeth Burke – June 27, 2020

   I’ve worn this every day since it arrived. I plug it in to charge once a week, it seems to only take a couple hours. I thought seeing my texts, calendar and email would be gimmicky but I really love it now. Sleep tracking, women’s health, steps, hills, gps are all spot on & helpful. I’m still wondering if stress and body battery readings are accurate because if they are I might be a walking miracle. So many ways to personalize the watch face and the band options are endless.

6. 

   Rated 5 out of 5

   Castings – August 1, 2020

   Perfect for me

7. 

   Rated 5 out of 5

   tony – September 5, 2020

   I was waiting for the Google watch but seeing that the battery life was poor (just like my old galaxy watch) I decided to go with something else. Great watch for the price and for being an older model. Already engaging in better health habits. Been figuring out the watch configurations along the way and looking forward to seeing what else this watch has to offer.

8. 

   Rated 5 out of 5

   Bob Desplaines – September 6, 2020

   Have not had it very long and still learning all the features. Love that I can now head out for my walks without dragging the phone along with me and listening to my Amazon Play lists, also like to maps and details of my walks. Looking forward to returning to Florida so I can get back in the pool and see how it tracks my swim laps.

9. 

   Rated 5 out of 5

   Jordan – September 25, 2020

   I’ll come right out the gate and say that if you are looking for an excellent fitness tracker and will motivate you to actually exercise this is the ticket.I’ve owned products from Fitbit and an Apple Watch, but the Venu has by far been my favorite. Apple Watch certainly had the best smart features, but to be honest after having the thing for 3 years I didn’t bother with like 95% of them. Only think I care about is notifications, and the Garmin does just fine with that. What I really cared about was the fitness tracking, and Garmin is on a whole different level. Sure Fitbit is probably more “consumer” friendly and Apple allows for everything to be in one ecosystem, but if you are more into seeing metric like sweat loss, bar charts that can track your heart rate for the entire exercise, and GPS built right into the watch you have to go with the Garmin. The ability to have workouts built in outside of just stuff like walking, running, biking, the basics really, is top notch. Will I ever use ones like the paddle boarding and the cross country skiing? Probably not, but it’s there for people who will. The app is also really great, and motivating. Both my parents also use Garmin products, so it’s really fun to compete with them on who can be the best. Being able to connect with social media and compete with all my friends is also really fun as well. The app is, for the most part, well laid out. Might take some time to find were some stuff is, but the internet is your best friend and Garmin’s website has lots of info on it to answer your questions. Another plus is the battery life. My Fitbit products were decent with maybe 2-4 days depending on what I did. Apple Watch was terrible, usually a day at most and towards the end of its life I sometimes had to charge it twice in a day. The Venu? Well when Garmin says 5-7 days they mean it. That’s dependent out course. Workouts that use GPS take more power, and using the built in music paying doubles that. Still I’d say I use it at an average level, and before the first charge I got 5 days, and probably could’ve got 6. That ‘s impressive on a device that has an AMOLED screen, and a very good one at that.Cons? Well the 3rd party watch face support is pretty abysmal. Most of them require a 3rd party payment outside of the app, which is a no-no in my book. I found that most of the free ones I downloaded, which nice, drained the battery a lot faster and some of them actually messed the with raise to wake feature. I’d recommend just making one using your own photos or use the stock ones from Garmin. The app store is also a completely separate app, also a bummer, and quite frankly I don’t see myself ever adding any apps outside of Spotify anyway. I hope maybe Garmin eventually just adds into into the primary ConnectApp.Really, though, I think there are very few negatives about the device, actually most are just Garmin’s software. The device itself is very good, worth the money, and I would recommend to anyone who wants a good competitive product to what Apple and Fitbit offer that wants superior fitness tracking abilities.