Garmin - Venu GPS Smartwatch 43mm Fiber-Reinforced Polymer - Black - (2019)

The Venu has a great display, awesome GPS acquisition, and a ton of fitness tracking features. It looks great, and is relatively lightweight and the stock band is comfortable. Battery life is also great, I had it on for 24 hours, using only smart watch features, and the battery only went down to 81%. However, some seemingly simple smart watch functions do not work, such as the Weather widget. I spent two frustrating days following all of Garmin’s online suggestions for iOS users, to no avail. This is a big, recurring complaint in other online reviews. I finally had to get over the fact that I need to look at my phone for weather info. I can’t believe that so-called IT programming engineers at Garmin can’t figure this out. Come on, guys... it’s a $400 watch and it should work. All notifications (text messages, FB Messenger, incoming calls, etc) work fine. No ability to respond on iOS devices, though. I also had a hard time syncing my Amazon Music account directly to the watch, but it finally worked on attempt #7. It works fine, and is a nice feature. I can easily use the controls to play music from my phone, however. I always have my phone with me on runs, so it’s not a big deal for me. Running the music from the watch itself uses a lot of battery juice, so I’ll keep my music on the phone. Once I got over all of that, I do enjoy the fitness functions a lot. The watch faces are customizable, and easy to read even in direct sunlight. Way more options than even the newest Apple 5 Watch. The always- on feature is great. Overall, I’ll keep it because of the tremendous fitness tracking, but I’m a little disappointed in the lack of smart watch functionality.

I bought this watch so I could listen to Spotify while skateboarding without having to keep my phone in my pocket. It took a little bit to set up. I had to download 2 apps on my phone and connect it to my laptop just to connect to my phone and setup Spotify but once I got it figured out I was able to download my playlists from Spotify straight to the watch and connect directly from the watch to my headphones so my phone can stay in my backpack without having any connection issues. The sound quality is great too. After about 3-4 hours of constant streaming the battery only drains about 20%. The watch is lightweight and comfortable to wear. I bought it for skateboarding but ended wearing it all the time. Tons of custom watch face options on the Garmin IQ app (some are free, some aren’t) and you can create you’re own watch face on the app as well.

Use this for general fitness tracking, and for tracking my runs and bike rides. I like the Garmin application, it provides good insights about activities and health stats. Integrates well with other health and sports apps like apple health, strata, rally, myfitness app. Weekly activity emails are really nice and creating dashboards on the garminconnect website allow me to track progress over time. This was a good upgrade from the vivoactive 3. My experience with garmin products has been consistently positive. One time I needed help from customer support when a a piece of the watch wore off sooner that expected, they replaced the watch with a new one. I’ve had my Venu for 9 months and it works as expected.

I am very satisfied with my Venu, it performs as designed. The heart rate monitor works very well and I especially like the body battery. The original strap is very comfortable. The Venu fits very well on my medium sized wrist, I often forget I am wearing it. There are many watch faces that are free and very nice, you can also design your own watch face. I have not tried the GPS settings yet. I find the battery lasts about 4 days unless I turn on the oxygen sensor. It will drain the battery within 2 or 3 days. The Garmin is better at tracking my step then the other brands I have used. It doesn’t pick up unnecessary bumps, like when I mow the lawn. All in all I would say Garmin has put their best in an affordable smart watch that out performs the competition and should last for many years unlike their competitors. Please don’t but a Fitbit!!!!!!

Awesome watch if your looking for something tough and basic no touch screen and great for outdoors work and play highly recommend. Don't have to charge for like a week.

The set up of my Venu was about as simple as it gets. IQ Connect app has lots of great watch faces, widgets, etc to choose from. Watch is so light weight I almost don't notice it at all.

Got this as a Christmas gift and it's everything I expected