Garmin Venu 2 GPS sports watch review: A lovely display, long battery life, and extensive health data Review

Garmin announced the Venu 2 and Venu 2S today and for the previous 10 days I have been working, biking, and walking with larger Garmin Venu 2 GPS sporting activities enjoy. The Venu 2/2S give some useful updates to support keep you educated about your in general well being and devote much more time with the enjoy among prices.

The Venu 2 and Venu 2S offers the exact performance with the variation found in the size of the enjoy, together with linked more compact battery in the Venu 2S. These watches are out there now for $399.ninety nine with an assortment of band and bezel shade options.

Also: Garmin Venu critique: Vibrant AMOLED screen can make this a person of the best GPS sporting activities watches for the masses

Garmin Venu 2/2S vs Venu

The original Garmin Venu brought an OLED screen to Garmin’s lineup and was a persuasive enjoy. Seeking at the earlier design, the adhering to advancements are present in the Venu 2/2S:

• Lengthier battery daily life with quick recharging and a battery saver manner
• Sleep rating with sleep insights
• Physical fitness age
• Health snapshot
• More songs storage capacity
• HIIT action profile, enhanced power training action profile and graphics
• Two dimensions to opt for from

These are just the more characteristics and features on the enjoy even though we even now see a host of Garmin characteristics provided as effectively. These consist of preloaded animated exercise routines, 25 sporting activities apps, safety and tracking characteristics, offline songs guidance for Spotify, Amazon, or Deezer, Garmin Fork out, and Connect IQ application guidance.

Technical specs

• Show (Venu 2): one.three-inch 416×416-pixel resolution AMOLED Corning Gorilla Glass three/li>
• Show (Venu 2S): one.one-inch 360×360-pixel resolution AMOLED Corning Gorilla Glass three/li>
• Storage: Inner storage for up to 650 tracks and two hundred hours of action data
• Water resistance: 5 ATM
• Connectivity and sensors: WiFi, Bluetooth, ANT+, GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, optical HR, barometer, compass, altimeter, Pulse Ox
• Band: 18mm (Venu 2S) and 22mm (Venu 2) silicone replaceable strap
• Battery: 8 hours with GPS and songs streaming and eleven days in smartwatch manner for the Venu 2, seven hours with GPS/songs and 10 days in smartwatch manner for the Venu 2S
• Dimensions (Venu 2): forty five.four x forty five.four x twelve.2mm and 49 grams
• Dimensions (Venu 2S): forty.four x forty.four x twelve.1mm and 38.2 grams
• Colours (Venu 2): Silver bezel with Granite Blue circumstance, Slate bezel with Black circumstance
• Colours (Venu 2S): Slate bezel with Graphite circumstance, Light-weight Gold bezel with Light-weight Sand circumstance, Silver bezel with Mist Gray circumstance, Rose Gold Bezel with White circumstance

Hardware

Considering the fact that I have larger wrists and choose massive watches, Garmin despatched together the Venu 2 with a Slate bezel with black circumstance for me to exam for a few months. I reviewed the original Garmin Venu in late 2019 and so are unable to review it straight to the Venu 2. On the other hand, I even now have the Garmin Darth Vader Legacy Saga unit and the Venu 2 appears to be like just about the exact, until eventually you switch it on.

Leading ZDNET Testimonials

The Garmin Venu 2 has a wonderful, vivid one.three-inch AMOLED screen with striking black and vivid shades. There is even now a little bit of a bezel about the viewable screen out to the shell of the enjoy. The screen is also quite responsive to swipes and faucets.

There are two buttons on the right side of the unit. The leading right button is the motion button that is made use of for commencing your action timer, viewing the controls menu, and initializing the incident detection/notification feature. The bottom button, back again, is made use of to return to the preceding screen, mark a lap, see unit configurations, and much more. From the enjoy confront you need to have to push and hold on the back again button to get to the configurations menus.

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A delicate silicone band is provided with the Venu 2. Fast launch levers and pins are found on the band so you can immediately and simply swap out bands. The heart amount observe is positioned on the middle of the back again. It is really also excellent to see the typical four-pin Garmin charging connector present on the Venu 2.

View application

If you have made use of Garmin GPS sporting activities watches right before then it will be fast and straightforward for you to pick up and use the Garmin Venu 2. Even if you are new to using the touchscreen and two buttons to navigate, it need to only get you a small period of time of time to determine out how to navigate about and locate almost everything.

The default enjoy confront is quite essential with a concentrate on displaying off some good shades on the AMOLED screen. Quite a few other individuals are loaded on the enjoy, some with customization options way too. You can also download hundreds (maybe much more) of enjoy faces from the Connect IQ store.

The Venu 2 is designed for the daily, informal athlete that mixes up working, biking, walking, swimming, yoga, pilates, and other indoor/outdoor sporting activities. More than 25 sporting activities apps are out there and withing every single of these sporting activities you can personalize the shows and data that is proven. Some routines, this kind of as yoga, exhibit you animated graphics of the various moves and as somebody who almost never performs yoga this is a awesome feature to have on the enjoy. You can get much more programs and data fields from the Connect IQ Retail store.

As somebody who is investing much more time on the golfing system with the Garmin Solution CT10 club trackers I obtained, it is really excellent to see the comprehensive golfing guidance on the Venu 2. The Venu 2 is designed to be a quite eye-catching GPS sporting activities enjoy selection for the masses.

Swipe up or down on the enjoy confront to scroll by your widget glances. Tapping on any of these smaller glance options opens up the full widget so you can see your gathered data in excellent detail. Quite a few much more options are out there in this article in 2021, like Overall body Battery, pressure, sleep, and many much more. Sleep now also reveals a sleep rating on the Venu 2. This sleep rating and insights are provided by Firstbeat Analytics.

Like most modern Garmin gadgets, the Venu 2 has an integrated Wi-Fi radio so you can have your action data synced to your Garmin Connect account when you return to a Wi-Fi zone earlier set up. It is really excellent to enter my home after doing work out and have my data synced quickly to my Garmin account.

Just one exercise session selection is known as Health Snapshot and you can pick out it to see various well being data captured more than a two-moment period of time that can then be logged and shared. Breathwork is a further out there action with a number of approaches that can be made use of to minimize pressure and boost your well being. Throughout these demanding periods, breathwork is a excellent way to concentrate and reenergize your self.

Smartphone application and web site

Accumulating the data is significant, but using that data for tracking trends, bettering overall performance, challenging friends, and determining difficulty parts is also quite significant. Garmin offers the Garmin Connect application for iOS and Android and it is a highly effective and ability application that carefully matches the Connect web site working experience.

When you very first launch the smartphone application you will see a screen known as My Working day. This is a dashboard and entirely customizable to your tastes. Merely scroll to the bottom and opt for to Edit My Working day. Right here you can opt for from the adhering to playing cards: Heart amount, techniques, depth minutes, flooring, sleep, pressure rating, bodyweight, and calories. There are also toggles to see yesterday’s stats and the previous seven days of stats. In addition, when you history an action (run, bike experience, and so on.) on that day a box appears up leading with that card. Tapping any card will take you into considerably much more fantastic detail for that measurement.

See also: Very best GPS sporting activities enjoy for working 2021

Other tabs in the smartphone application consist of worries, calendar, news feed, and notifications. Tap on the tab icon to see much more information for every single of these.

You can also tap the much more icon to bounce to insights, action stats, well being stats, exercise routines, system, segments, equipment, connections, groups, LiveTrack, Connect IQ store, Garmin gadgets, configurations, and support. This menu and person interface matches what you see on the web site as effectively. You can see data more than different time frames, see your documents, see the badges you earned, see totals and averages, and considerably much more.

There are options to manage phone notifications all through your action and at all other periods when you are not recording data as element of action. If you are related to an Android smartphone, you can go to Settings>Smart Notifications in the Garmin phone application to personalize exactly which apps give notifications to the Forerunner 745. You do not have this for every application manage when related to an Apple iphone.

With a paired Android phone, you can also pick out to reply to messages with textual content you have presently setup in advance on your phone. This includes custom-made textual content responses.

When there are a plethora of exercise session options on the enjoy you can also download preset exercise routines from Garmin Connect. Even improved, you can develop your have customizable exercise routines with more than one,400 exercise routines to opt for from. seventy five preset animated exercise routines are provided for cardio, yoga, power, HIIT, and pilates so you genuinely have no justification not to be able to acquire exercise routines that appeal to you and meet up with your well being and wellness demands.

The Garmin Connect web site working experience is quite identical to what you see in the smartphone application, with even much more ability to produce studies, import or export data, setup connections to other programs (this kind of as Strava, RunKeeper, and MyFitnessPal), and much more. Equivalent to the snapshots interface on the phone, you have a dashboard on Garmin Connect that you can personalize.

Also: Garmin Darth Vader Legacy Saga Collection critique: Star Wars themed sporting activities enjoy offers comprehensive well being and fitness characteristics

Daily utilization ordeals and conclusion

When I even now need to have to devote much more time training and tracking with the Venu 2, it is really a stable improve from the very first technology design and may well be a person of the most eye-catching Garmin gadgets for informal athletes and those wanting for an exceptional each day action tracker. It also supports songs and Garmin Fork out, but I have yet to exam those features.

Automated incident detection and manually brought on alerts are provided so you can notify folks by way of your related smartphone if you are in difficulty.

In the earlier, it was reasonably straightforward for me to leading up by body battery to a hundred{d11068cee6a5c14bc1230e191cd2ec553067ecb641ed9b4e647acef6cc316fdd} after sleeping for a number of hours, but Garmin created a few variations to its algorithms to much more precisely seize the high quality of your sleep. I have to say it is considerably tougher to leading up body battery and that in fact matches my way of living and in general sensation considerably improved than right before.

I have not experienced the enjoy extensive plenty of to completely exam the battery daily life, but I have only charged it up as soon as and the rated battery daily life appears exact. More testing will get position as I continue to check out with the Venu 2.

Garmin has some rigid competition in this place with the much more affordable Polar Vantage M and Coros Tempo 2, but the ecosystem, concentrate on daily routines, Connect IQ customization, and much more make the Venu 2 a persuasive GPS sporting activities enjoy for the masses. It is out there in a wide variety of shades, and the more compact size Venu 2S, for a cost of $399.ninety nine.