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Garmin is not letting up. It wants a bigger piece of the smartwatch action and certainly has a few attributes in its favour. Principally, its kit has been a witness to your fitness years before Apple, Samsung and Fitbit were on the scene. Unlike the Apple's Watch, Garmin's wristwear can last for days and doesn’t just work with iPhones either. All of which made 2019's Venu and its colourful touchscreen display the most significant Garmin in years: a bona fide smartwatch for serious fitness addicts. So it comes as no surprise that the Venu 2 is here to build on that legacy.
From building training plans for your first 5K race to giving you workouts directly on the watch screen, it improves the first Venu watch's headline features without sacrificing on stamina. So can the Garmin Venu 2 hang with the very best smartwatches around? Here's how it shaped up after a fortnight's usage…
Bigger and brighter
Garmin doesn’t bring big changes for the Venu 2's aesthetics, but does improve on the original's standout feature. There’s the same polymer and textured stainless-steel bezel combo that now wraps itself around a larger watch body and a bigger, high-resolution 1.3-inch screen that feels roughly on par with what the likes of Apple Watch Series 6 has to offer. It’s a display that’s brighter and more colourful, albeit not entirely faultless when you need to view it out in bright sunlight.
The most significant changes lie with the software though. Garmin has had to adapt its traditional thinking with a bigger emphasis on swiping and tapping a screen as opposed to pressing physical buttons. This was a bit messy on the first Venu, but thankfully it's much easier to find where everything lives now. Just a simple swipe up or down will get you to checking on how far behind you are on your daily step goal and checking your heart rate.
Of course, the usual downside of having a bigger, higher-quality screen is that it typically comes at the expense of battery life. It’s part of the reason why the Apple Watch lasts for a day or two and not weeks. Garmin has built its reputation on strong stamina and while the Venu 2 won’t last for a month between charges, it can stretch to just under a week. It’s not quite the maximum ten days promised, especially if you’re making use of its full complement of features.
If you want that screen on 24/7, it’ll last a few days short of a week. You do have a rapid recharge support here that lets you plug it into a charger for ten minutes and get a day’s play or enough for an hour of exercise tracking.
A younger, fitter you
As ever, Garmin knows how to cover the sports tracking bases better than most and that doesn’t change with the Venu 2. If you want something to reliably keep tabs on your runs or time in the pool, it does that no problem. It’s the same for smartwatch features. You can still see notifications and Android users can respond to messages too. You can pile on Spotify playlists to listen to offline and there’s now room for up to 2,000 songs.
What with the past year of Covid-induced lockdowns, Garmin wants to make sure Venu 2 is just as handy for at-home or gym-related workouts as it is in the great outdoors. When it’s time for a quick HIIT fix, you can now set up dedicated timers for punishing Tabata sessions, so you stick to the right rest times between quad-crushing squats. When we grabbed some weights or stuck to some bodyweight time, it showed us which muscle groups we'd focused on.
Although the Venu 2 won’t help detect signs that might point to a serious heart condition or alert you that you have a high temperature, it does want to give you a sense of how fit and healthy you are. It uses its onboard sensors, such as its latest heart-rate sensor and pulse oximeter sensor, to provide a “Health Snapshot”. This quick scan tells me my average stress levels, blood oxygen levels and even respiration rate. If you don’t know what those mean, you’ll need to head into Garmin’s Connect app to get a better idea.
It also wants to make it easier to tell you your fitness age, because who doesn’t want to find out they might have the fitness age of a much younger person? Taking your age, exercise history, heart rate and body fat percentage measurements taken from a Garmin smart scale, you’ll get that fitness age. We were pleased to find ours was eight or nine years younger than our actual age. If you get a less than desirable fitness age, then tips and recommendations are offered up. Your fitness age will be available directly from the watch, Garmin just hasn’t rolled it out yet.
Garmin Venu 2 verdict
The Garmin Venu 2, like the Venu, is a smartwatch that wants to help you make fitness gains and do so without staring at a single-digit battery status at the end of each day. By delivering a higher-quality screen and addressing some of the software quirks that needed cleaning up from the first Venu, it's all round a better sporty smartwatch to live with. If you like the sound of a Garmin that offers rich sports tracking features and isn’t just about training you for a marathon, then the Venu 2 has plenty to offer you.
£349. garmin.com
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