Garmin Venu Sq Music Amazon Exclusive GPS Smartwatch with All-day Health Monitoring and Fitness Features, Built-in Sports Apps and More, Black with Rose Gold Bezel

The Garmin brand has traditionally focussed on fitness and navigation, so it's not a surprise that this watch has a fitness focus. However, it also functions well as a smart watch and is rich with features once you get used to it. I have the standard version (can't download music)Fitness:This watch tracks cycling and running well enough and the built in GPS means you don't have to take your phone if you don't want to.It's also pretty good at tracking strength training, and makes a pretty good guess at what exercises you are doing from my experience of using it. A rep counter, rest timer, and heart data has actually been really helpful to me for improving my workouts. You can enter weight into the watch after every set, or do it afterwards in the app if you want to track it. However, I don't think you can get the data back out of the app so it's less useful for tracking weight and I no longer bother entering the weight data.Sleep, blood oxygen, and stress data are there if you want them, they aren't something that I use.Smart watch:This phone works great for android notifications, allowing you to view and dismiss notifications in a way that works with your phone (so your phone will also mark them viewed or dismissed). This is a marked step up from the cheaper smart watches out there that don't integrate with your phones notifications, just replicate them. You can also block apps from showing on the watch but if you're like me, you'll want to use the app to block almost everything to avoid constant buzzes on your wrist.Unlike most other Garmin watches, the square display makes this great for reading text. The display is ok brightness but I tend to keep the brightness on low (and therefore create a problem for myself in summer). There is now a v2 that has an AMOLED screen which I'm quite jealous of.The Garmin Connect app is ok, it's a bit clunky but it generally works. I had one incident where the watch stopped syncing and I had to re-pair it with my phone, but it's only happened once in about a year. It's a bit annoying that the watch faces are in a different app as I understand they used to all be available in the main Garmin Connect app, but I just found one I liked and then uninstalled the watch face app.You do need to be prepared to do a bit of tinkering in the app to get the watch to behave exactly as you want, but it's actually deeply customisable. You can set your favourite exercises to track, choose what quick settings appear, select the screen order, choose which apps notify you etc. I found myself being able to do all these things easily enough without having to google it.Form factor:I have fairly skinny wrists for a man, but this watch doesn't look oversized. The strap is actually really comfortable for me, I thought I'd want to replace it quickly but actually have continued using it. I haven't suffered any rashes like some reviewers, and I like how it's non-slip without feeling clingy. And I love that if I did want a different strap, I could buy any standard strap out there rather than have to hunt for a special Garmin one.It looks ok, it's not exactly stylised but that's fine with me. It's sleek enough to wear in a professional environment. Sometimes people do mistake it for an Apple watch. The main thing for me is that it doesn't look like a huge chunky computer on my wrist, which it doesn't.The proprietary charging cable is annoying, both for its ridiculously short length but also for the fact that if you go away without it you can't charge it. Unlike USB and lightning cables, no newsagents are going to sell these for a few quid if you find yourself in need of a charge! No doubt the port is smaller than a USB-C one but I resent having to travel with lots of different cables. I use a longer third-party cable that I also bought from Amazon and leave the Garmin one in my travel wash bag so I don't forget it.Battery:Incredible. Garmin are the kings of smart watch battery life, and the Venu SQ is no exception. It also charges relatively fast. I don't track how long it lasts but whenever I do get a low battery notification I usually can't remember when I last charged it. Using GPS tracking will of course drain it faster.Overall I'm very happy with the watch and would recommend, particularly to Android users who can't buy an Apple watch, or to anyone wanting to step up from the Chinese semi-smart watches at the lowest price points in the market.

I’ve had this just over a week now, long enough I think to form some worthwhile impressions.I’ve had a Fitbit One for around 10 years and found it valuable for what it does. What it does, that I liked, was sit in my pocket, count steps and count the equivalent of flights of stairs as well. It was also totally reliable until recently when the battery has started to fail. What I really wanted was a replacement that was just the same. I don’t like to have to wear a step counter on my wrist. It’s a nuisance and they all look cheap and tacky compared to a good quality watch.A bit of internet searching left me with the certainty that no one does a Fitbit One equivalent that’s worth buying. So I started looking at wearable fitness ‘watches’.Fitbit Charge 4 was my first choice but the reviews, not only of that item but of most other Fitbit stuff, suggested accuracy, long-term reliability, and poor customer service were repeating issues. So my search ended on this Garmin Venu Sq. Not at all what I wanted, but as close as I could get.It’s nicely packaged and arrived with a 50% battery charge so that was nice too. Nothing to assemble. Quick set up with the screens on the watch itself. I was wearing it, counting steps, and observing heart rate before I’d even looked at my phone. This itself was very pleasing. There is so much expensive stuff that arrives, you unpack it, all excited, and then have to faff around looking for a phone and downloading apps before anything will work.There is an app that goes with this so you can do the phone stuff if you want to, and you need the app if you want a watch face other than the default that comes with the watch. The app provides additional functionality as it should. But the watch works without it. The phone app keeps track of health stats and ‘challenges’ and watch your health progress. I love all that stuff, because I find it motivates me.The first thing that annoyed me about the Venu Sq (and several things annoy me about the Venu). Was the that the default watch face just tells the time. I have to scroll to see my step count - which is all I’m really interested in. I’ve had to download another watch face just to get the key information - heart rate and steps - on view as soon as I look at the watch.I don’t have especially thick wrists but there’s only a little bit of strap left after threading through the buckle. My wristwatch with a metal bracelet is comfy and I forget I’m wearing it. The strap on this Venu is plasticky and I’m aware of it clinging to my wrist all the time. It’s not heavy, just doesn’t have a good skin contact feel. I imagine that in the summer it’s going to get sticky underneath it. So why on earth it’s intended for wear 24 hours a day I’ve no idea. I’ve sacrificed sleep tracking for the pleasure of removing it when I go to bed.This watch has a touch sensitive screen you have no choice but to touch (even though the watch has buttons on the side) to scroll through options. The touch sensitive screen is not very touch sensitive. Sometimes it works quickly and efficiently, sometimes it seems that it is ignoring a touch, while in actuality it’s just thinking about it for a while. One screen with three ‘suns’ on keeps appearing, I swipe to get rid of it and all that happens is I change what’s highlighted and the screen stubbornly stays where it is. It is the single most frustrating thing I’ve found so far.You can tell the Venu Sq your favourite forms of exercise and get it to record those activities specifically. For me there’s only one, walking. To track a walk goes like this: press top button once, press top button again, wait for GPS to lock on, when it’s locked, and this can take a couple of hundred yards of walking before it starts tracking, you have to press the button yet again to get it to start recording. So I’ve got three button presses and an indeterminate wait to record a walk as a specific exercise period and if I miss on any one of these actions only the steps are counted because the watch does that anyway.Step accuracy while walking is excellent. It matches my mental count within one or two steps over 100 paces. But this watch does seem to record arm movements too (something that doesn’t happen with a Fitbit One in my pocket). I put the watch on this morning, didn’t move my feet, and by the time I’d finished brushing my hair I’d apparently done 32 steps. This throws the daily count accuracy into question and gives a reason why my daily step counts are a good bit higher than with my Fitbit.One thing I love is the map that shows me where I walked. You get a diddy one on the watch face, and a very detailed one on the app. The app version shows pace in different colours and shows elevation changes on a graph. There is also a graph of pulse changes too. Great fun to see where the going was a bit harder.Battery life seems ok, though I haven’t fully sussed that out yet. Using GPS for exercise logging takes a big chunk out of the battery life, using the Venu Sq purely as a step counter with occasional checks during the day, I’m only losing 2-3% of battery a day. I suspect that if you switched on GPS for a full day’s hiking then you might have battery problems. The charging cable is a bit on the short side.The watch itself detects wrist movement so it switches on the display when you lift your wrist to eye. This works most of the time, sometimes is a bit slow, and sometimes needs a tap to wake it up.What I like:Bright screen, accurate step count while walking, choice of watch faces, pulse rate monitor, the map of my walk.What I don’t like:Strap, counts some arm movements as steps, touch screen frequently fails to respond to first touch, too fiddly to start to record a walk.If you really need something to wear to help you with your fitness goals then this might not be the best, but it’s certainly acceptable and a lot more affordable than big name smartwatches. For me it has a lot of niggles, but nothing I can’t live with. For me it’s the best from a bunch where nothing does what I want or is as good as I want and on that basis I’m quite happy with my purchase.