Customer Ratings & Reviews

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.

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.

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.

Garmin hit it out of the park with this watch. The overall case design is sharp, and can be worn to formal events. Personally, I prefer a traditional round watch face as opposed to Apple's design. Next, the screen is very bright and easy to read in direct sunlight. The DPI of the screen is quite high which is a big step for Garmin. As expected, all of the telemetry about my body and activities is well organized in Garmin Connect. I love the pulse ox and sleep tracking feature as well. It's a great watch that encourages me to go out and exercise.

This watch is just beautiful. I purchased the silver one and I love love love it! It's my first smartwatch. It's very simple to use use. You can customize it to fit your life style. Tracking is accurate. The Garmin connect app is always very easy to use. This will make you challenge yourself more in your workouts. See your progress and make improvements. You can store your music or connect it to your phone. You receive notifications right on your wrist. Again the watch is so beautiful, bright colors, and so comfortable.

Love my Garmin Venu watch. It stores music making it so easy to listen to your favorite tunes while working out. I love the touch screen and all the ways it measures fitness. GPS works great, color is very vivid, and battery life is pretty good. The garmin app is great too and watch syncing is fast.

Sleep Tracking is super inaccurate compared to FitBit. The Hydration logging doesn’t get stored after midnight if you don’t sync your watch before midnight. Garmin support says I would have to sync daily. Additionally, it doesn’t display half cups within Hydration anymore. The software developers really dropped the ball with storing data for all the inputs. However, having Bluetooth, Storage (3.5 GB), Spotify and GPS means you can go for runs without your phone. Watch band is comfortable and adjustable.

My best smart watch yet. Steps & distance are accurate. Music control is a nice feature to have on watch & so many other features on this watch. I love it's health technology & GPS if I ever need it but for now I don't use GPS. Best watchI ever brought & it's round not square yay!

Great watch and tracking. The screen is bright and very readable in direct sunlight. I don't turn on the notifications or use the smartwatch features since I feel it's still lacking. Overall, it looks great!

I’m very happy with this Garmin smart watch is very comfortable.even when is a sport watch you can also use for any occasion.

Initially thisbwas a great product , worked well. After couple of months the Pulse Ox meter stop reading and that continued for couple of months, suddenly it starts working. Recently the device stopped refreshing witht the app. But still I love this device, and especially the app and the information it captures. On top of, this has really cool features, and if everything works this is the best.

First let me say that this is an actual review and I don't get any compensation for it except for the 25 BB points. I'm a big review and ratings guy. I do some decent research before I buy anything. That being said, I'll spend a few minutes hopefully helping someone else to make a decision. Should you buy this watch? Probably. I've had a lot of these 'activity' or 'smart watches' over the years and whenever anyone asks me about this, my answer is, "it depends on what you want it to do". There are prettier smart watches on the market. Fossil, Samsung, Apple - all make a sharper looking watch. But the biggest deal breaker for me with any of them is battery life. They all stink - one day, if that, with any usage. Longer if you shut off every option they have that drains battery. And for me to have to charge it every day, I'd end up forgetting to put it back on one day, and then it would happen again. Sooner or later I would just not be wearing it. A dead watch is a bracelet. The Venu will last for a good 3 days with everything on (except constant GPS and using the music feature). It fully charges in about 40 minutes. I have a plug in my car and get back up to 60-80% if I'm driving for a bit and I'm a little low. Now don't get me wrong, the Garmin Venu is a very nice looking watch in it's own right. The display is bright and sharp. There are a bunch of watch faces in the IQ store. You can even take a picture of something with your phone or save a pic from the internet and make it the phone's background. Pretty cool. The interface is good and gets better and better every year. Every once in awhile I have to swipe twice for something to work but I think that's more of a 'fat finger' thing than a watch thing. As a fitness device, it's a Garmin. The GPS stuff is legit. I don't care if the phone can track my exact footsteps - the metrics and distance are usually good. Take it golfing and it'll give you the front mid and back of the green after you download any course. You'll last the whole day with power, but you'll need a recharge soon after - but like I said, those are quick. For most other activities, the battery isn't an issue because you aren't using GPS. Walks inside and out, elliptical and sports all seem to track well. As a regular guy that isn't a fitness guy, it does everything I need and will do a whole pile of things more if I need. For the smart watch stuff, it's very good. I have a bunch of alarms set for different things and the vibrations are strong enough to get my attention every time. It has canned responses that you can choose from to reply to incoming texts. All notifications can be turned on or off on the app. And the music stuff is pretty cool too. You can download songs onto your watch, pair some bluetooth headphones to the watch and leave your phone home. Heath metrics seem good. There's all these blinking lights on the back that seem to be doing something. I find the blood ox feature interesting as well as the stress indicators, sleep tracking and a bunch of other stuff - all right on the watch. The app itself is great and clearly has all the data I want and it's easy enough to read. Bottom line? Not a fenix for crazy sports people. Not a Apple watch for smart watch. But it's not far off the best of either for me to notice. It just does everything well. And in some cases, I think better. If you need more battery, buy the Vivoactive 4 or wait for the Vivoactive 5. It's the exact same watch but has a different display that isn't as bright but will last a week. Why only 4 stars? The watch band isn't the most comfortable - plan on looking for a 20mm quick release band on Amazon. They're all more comfortable. This one will last fine but its not great. But all this together, I think this watch is the best option for most people.

The Garmin Venu watch is a fun and accurate fitness watch first and smart watch second! I had the samsung active 2 watch and i did not liked that i had to charge the watch almost every night. Also the metrics provided were not that useful for what i was looking for. Then i decided to try the fitbit sense and the analytics provided by the fit bit sense was granular and indepth but, the sensors were not accurate specially the heart rate sensor. After doing further research i found the garmin venu watch. I exchanged the sense for the venu here are my findings: Battery life: I am getting about 5 days worth of battery life and i mostly use it to track my 30-40 mins of low intensity cardio mostly walking on my treadmill. then i track 60-70 mins everyday at the gym mostly lifting weights. So i dont use the gps as much and i also dont use the music feature of the watch. Accuracy: The watch is super accurate when it comes down to measuring the heart rate while working out as well as how many calories burned per activity. What i liked also about the watch is when i walk on my treadmill the distance often does not reflect the treadmill's distance. Garmin thought about that and they allow you to make changes to the distance walked during each work out to reflect the treadmill's if there is a discrepancy. Sleep tracking: The sleep tracking is about 70-90% accurate. The watch can reflect when i remember being awake during the morning. For example around 4-5 am my cat will usually wake me up because he wants to be fed. If i look at the sleep information in the app 8-10 the watch will show i was up around that time. It does not provide a sleeping score like fitbit but, it provides the spo2 which throws into the algorithms to provide how much energy your body recuperate from sleep. Finally what i love the most is the integration with myfitnesspal. I love to track my calories in and calories out. The app does the math and sends the information back and forth between both apps. Samsung and apple watch were not able to do that. My conclusion.... If youre looking for a fitness tracker first and smart watch second look no further! This watch is it! It's very accurate! The battery life will last 4-5 days enough to get you plenty of data or your fitness during the week!

This watch does what Garmin is good at (activity tracking, fitness tracking, and battery life), and takes it up a notch. All the activity tracking features work great, and some metrics seem way more accurate on this watch than on my old Vivoactive HR (floors climbed especially). Battery lasts about five days without GPS usage, and about 3-4 with a few GPS-tracked activities. For as bright and beautiful a display as this watch has, that is impressive battery life! GPS is very accurate on outdoor activities as well, perfectly following a small walking path around my local park. Haven’t tested it out on a bike ride yet, but this stuff really is Garmin’s forte. Plus, onboard music storage is now a feature, which I love. I hate having my phone with me at the gym, but I often wish I could listen to music while working out. Problem solved! Smartwatch features are fairly sparse (the ones I’ve used are calendar, viewing phone notifications, and weather) which is a positive in my books. I don’t want all those extras on my wrist! But if you do, I would look at a different type of smartwatch. It is very comfortable to wear, and the round watch face is very smart looking. And I can’t say enough about how nice the AMOLED display is! Bright, beautiful, and clear! Tons of watch faces to choose from, most of which offer a large degree of customization, and even more are available on Garmin Connect IQ. To summarize, the Venu is a major step up from my old Vivoactive HR, and does everything I want it to. Activity tracking, GPS, music, and plus it looks super sharp! It doesn’t have all the extra features, but to me the lack of fluff was a selling feature. I hope my short review helps!

I wound up returning a Fitbit versa 2 for this Garmin. I myself am a bigger guy due to weightlifting and such. My arms and forearms are relatively larger then the average person and this caused issues with my Fitbit. It would not track sleep at all and wound up trying out 3 diff versa 2’s. Afterwards the girl who’d been helping me out suggested this Garmin. I chose this over the vivo active 3 because I wanted a similar screen as the versa. This unit is amazing. It tracks my body battery,stress,sleep,pulse ox and fitness just like the versa 2. The band is big and I have no issues wearing this device. The first day was wonky with sleep tracking but it learns over time. By the 3rd day I had very accurate sleep readings along with my pulse ox while sleeping which was huge. I love the ability to have pulse ox turned on all day especially with covid going around this is an amazing feature to have displayed throughout the day. Battery with that feature on and everything else ticking including constant notifications from my phone gives me just under 4 days of power time. Takes only 1 hr to charge from dead which is very nice as well. I won’t be returning to Fitbit and am now looking at a Phoenix watch for down the road. P.S the GPS in this Garmin unit is 100X better then fitbits built in god on the versa 2.

Great battery life. Bright display. Seems very durable. I wear it everyday at work. Hitting the display on everything and still no scratches or breay. Easy to connect to my Pixel 7 pro. Display size is adequate for a small watch.

I love this watch. I can customize the settings, it tracks my sleep, heart rate and many other amazing features! I have even promoted this watch to friends and family!

This is my first fitness tracking watch. I am pleased with the ease of use and how long the battery last between charges.