2024 the best workout watch review


Price: $349.99 - $269.99
(as of Nov 15, 2024 21:55:08 UTC - Details)

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Beautiful. Detailed. Alive. The venue GPS smartwatch features a bright, beautiful display and a battery life of up to five days, so you can spend more time doing the activities you love. Get on-screen, Animated cardio, strength, yoga and Pilates workouts right on your wrist. With the broadest available range of all-day health monitoring features — including respiration tracking, body battery energy monitor, stress and more — venu can show you the full picture of your health in vivid detail. Keep your phone and wallet at home, because this watch lets you download music for phone-free listening and pay from the wrist using Garmin pay contactless payment solution (available for supported cards from participating banks).
Beautiful, bright amoled display and up to five-day battery life in smartwatch mode; Up to six hours in GPS and music mode
The broadest range of all-day health monitoring features keeps track of your energy levels, respiration, menstrual cycle, stress, sleep, estimated heart rate and more
Easily download songs to your watch, including playlists from Spotify, Amazon music or Deezer (may require a premium subscription With a third-party music provider), and connect with headphones (sold separately) for phone-free listening
Record all the ways to move with more than 20 preloaded GPS and indoor sports apps, including yoga, running, pool swimming and more
Get easy-to-follow, animated cardio, strength, yoga and Pilates workouts right on your watch screen. Smartphone compatibility-iPhone, Android
Reviewer: Jordan
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: An Excellent Fitness Tracker With a Dash of Smartness
Review: 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.

Reviewer: Eric
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: This is a solid mid-tier smart watch.
Review: Upfront I've used Garmin GPS products but I've never used a smart watch from them until the Venu. It's a great tool and looks clean and sharp. It's comfortable, though I would recommend getting a couple different straps for different occasions. 3rd party options from Hemsut for example are very nice. The interface is straightforward and only leaves a little to be desired in that certain swipes can take a little bit of a learning period to know exactly how to touch the screen for best responsiveness. I found myself accidentally choosing the wrong options for the watch face layouts a couple times before I got used to the sensitivity. That's my problem though, probably. It has all the sensors you'd want for every day activities and some advanced functions too. Blood oxygen sensor is NICE. So is GPS for tracking rides, runs, etc. The software for the phone and PC are simple to use but powerful. About the battery life! GPS and oxygen sensors use a lot of battery. That's fine for when you're doing an activity or long distance work out, but when you have GPS active all the time for say, the sunrise/sunset info on the watch face, it eats it all day long. Same goes for the oxygen sensor. If you have these two things set to read you all day periodically, it'll reduce your battery life from 5-7 days to 2-3. One more thing, I love the ecosystem for Garmin so far. There are so many different watch faces to download, play with, customize. You can make your own. Different apps to download. You can control your music from it. So many cool things to do, I haven't even gotten to use all of them extensively yet. This is a keeper.

Reviewer: Richard Jett
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Great battery life..... Love this watch!
Review: 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.

Reviewer: caballoazul
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Me encanta que mide la saturación de oxígeno las pulsaciones la batería del cuerpo y el estrés.Funciona muy bien para correr

Reviewer: fastdude007
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Overall great features and good working apps. Since the screen is very bright, it does need recharging every 2 to 3 days, which is still very good.

Reviewer: Dana
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I have this watch for about a month and it works really good so far. I wear it almost all the time. Not perfect-flawless, but totally meets my needs (day-to-day use and GPS tracking) and expectations.Good things are:- AMOLED display is really nice and automatically adjusts brightness according to the surroundings- Changeable watch faces are amazing- Looks good with almost any clothes- GPS tracking is pretty accurate and I really love how walking and running activities look in the Garmin Connect app (You can see the whole route on the map and statistics about your speed, elevation gain, heart rate etc.). It's my favorite feature as I go hiking rather often.- Helps to manage my calorie intake. Burnt calories number is approximated based on body parameters and daily activity, however it's only an approximation and cannot be 100% trusted. In my case this number is used together with a calorie intake tracking app and it really helps with persuading myself to refrain from eating another piece of that tasty thing before I go to bed.- Workouts feature is useful when you already know what to do and only need a prompt (e.g. name of the exercise or yoga pose) and a timer. If you have no idea what that "Warrior Three pose" means, you just waste half of your time looking at the animations on the display. You also should know when to switch sides in advance - it may be tricky (Like "Oh, I just did a lunge with my right leg forward, should I do this one with my left leg?" ). Overall I think that built-in workouts is a good starting point. And you can create custom ones, which is definitely a huge plus.- Software updates are quite frequentNot so good things:- Battery life is shorter than expected, but it's absolutely enough for daily use. Yesterday I recorded a 4 hours walk (14.5km/9miles) after charging my watch up to 31% and after I came home it showed 9% remaining. Typically, one full charge lasts for around 4 days.- Sleep tracking is not accurate. If I wake up at night and stare at my phone for an hour or two, it just does not notice. I have no idea how to use this data, so it does not impact the rating in any way.- Heart rate monitor is somewhat inaccurate as well. It can just skip intensity peaks sometimes, nevertheless it is still good for low/moderate intensity activities like jogging or trekking. I kind of expected that as this is just a smart-watch and not a professional heart monitor, so still give 5 stars.- Last week the app started to annoy me by offering to set up email reports, and the notification pops up every time I open the app ignoring my selection never to ask again. Hope it will be gone with one of the next updates.- Garmin Pay requires a separate set up. May be I would use the payment feature if it was integrated with Google Pay which I already have on my phone, but may be not 🙂 Honestly, I'm just happy with paying with my phone.

Reviewer: EWA
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: If you permanently use the watch it discharges after a day or 1,5. Besides that nothing bad.

Reviewer: Kiyoshi Perkins
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Now that I've settled into a routine with the Venu, I love it all the more! The features are worthwhile, from the silent alarm, DND, and changing the watch face, to different preset workouts, syncing with the app, and more. The battery life is good, unless you have VO2 on all the time in which case it last about 1.5-2 days. It charges quickly too, but I wouldn't mind a notification on my phone when it's done charging (unless I haven't found it yet).Looking at my weekly recap I can see just how much my job makes me move and go up/down stairs all the time. The reminders to move as well as relax are great, and there are exercises pre-loaded to help relax. It also looks great, is light, and is sleek/not thick.

Customers say

Customers like the appearance and quality of the wearable computer. They mention it's a really nice looking watch, the colors are vivid, and the screen contrast is wonderful. Some are satisfied with accuracy. However, some customers have mixed opinions on the fitness tracker, battery life, functionality, ease of use, and features.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

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