Garmin Venu Review and Comparison

Garmin announced a completely new watch series the Garmin Venu, and it has made quite the impact with its users. This is Garmin’s first GPS smartwatch with an AMOLED screen and comes with a plethora of health and fitness tracking features. The AMOLED screen is makes it easier to check your watch while working out/on the move with higher visual clarity and contrast. The Venu is available now for $649 RRP and comes in a variety of colours including black, black/gold, granite blue and light sand/rose gold.

Garmin Venu Key Features

How Does it compare to the vivoactive 4 and vivomove 3

The Garmin Venu shines with its display resolution and AMOLED screen that set it apart from every other currently available Garmin smartwatch. In terms of other hardware factors, it sits on par with the vivoactive 4 and above the vivomove 3. The battery level is one area that isn't quite as powerful as the vivoactive 4 but, a day battery life is well above average.

The sensors packed with the Garmin Venu help to set it apart from many other smartwatch offers on the market. It comes with the standard sensors like the Barometric Altimeter, Compass, etc. In addition to these sensors though it comes with a couple of unique offerings like the Cadence sensor to help improve your cycling and the Pulse Ox sensor to measure your blood oxygen saturation. The Pulse Ox sensor is typically used for tracking your acclimation to a higher elevation. Still, it can also be used to check how well your sleeping by measuring how much oxygen is in your system.

The Garmin Venu is a multisport GPS so, it's no surprise how many features it has preloaded for tracking your health and fitness stats. Read the table above to find out all the features that come preloaded and how it compares against the vivomove and vivoactive 4.

Again the Venu and the vivoactive sit on par when comparing these features. The vivomove 3 doesn't quite have all the same features but, it was always designed to be a hybrid 'analogue' style watch and not a full GPS smartwatch.

Summary

Deciding between these three models should be fairly straightfoward after this guide. The vivomove 3 is a stylistic choice as it doesn't come with all the bells and whistles of the other watches but retains a classical style and feel. It's a little trickier between the vivoactive 4 and the venu as they're almost the exact same watch in terms of software. It really comes down to style, battery life and whether the brighter more vibrant AMOLED screen is enough to make up the price difference and shorter battery life.