Garmin Venu 3/3S – Feature rich with excellent battery life

Sports and smart watch functions

The Garmin Venu 3 has long battery life without the compromises usually found in smartwatches.

Smartwatches can usually be divided into two categories. Those with great user interfaces and a lot of functions that have to be charged more or less daily, and those with a long battery life but have a little more limitations in function. The Garmin Venu 3 doesn’t fit that description, as it has a long battery life and is feature-rich. This makes it close to ideal for a smartwatch.

Like many other smartwatches, the Garmin Venu 3 comes in two sizes, but unlike most, Garmin gives the smaller variant its own name, so it’s the smallest Garmin Venu 3S I’ve tested, but functionally it and the Venu 3 are pretty much identical. As size goes. I really appreciated the flexible format of the Garmin Venu 3S although it didn’t seem to have hurt battery life significantly.

I really have no idea how long I can last with the Garmin Venu 3. The watch drains the battery so slowly and charges so quickly that in over a month of testing I never charged it except when I took a shower. This is exactly what I want, not another gadget I have to think about charging, but enough gadget for the times when you still take the watch off. Anyway, Garmin states 10 days of battery life for the Venu 3S, and 14 days for the larger Venu 3.

The watch has a round display where the dark UI hides the fact that there are very thick bezels around it. Aside from the metal ring around the screen, the watch is made of plastic. Nothing fancy, but practical and durable.

Bright and responds quickly

The screen is OLED, colorful and has a high maximum brightness. The Watch also seems to respond well to swipe controls, though it doesn’t respond as instantly as the Apple Watch. You can turn it on so that the clock displays the time even when the screen is off, but then the battery life drops significantly. One feature I appreciate is Night Mode, when the bedtime watch displays the time using only silhouettes so it doesn’t shine too much in the dark of the night.

In addition to the touchscreen, the watch is controlled by three buttons that mostly act as shortcuts to different functions, where you can do most things with different swipes.

Fitness watches are Garmin’s main business and they have countless models that do their best to differentiate themselves with various advanced training features. The Venu series are meant to be smartwatches, which means working out is relatively toned down. If you want to estimate your stride length while running, the Forerunner series is probably the one you should look at, but for the everyday exerciser, you can access a myriad of training models with enough level of detail in scoring for most people at the touch of a button. Of course, the watch has GPS and pulse measurement, in addition to estimating steps and calories. New to the watch compared to previous versions is Wheelchair Mode, where you can indicate whether you are wheelchair-bound and adjust your training functions accordingly.

For general health, Garmin has additional support functions, such as sleep recording and a Body Battery function that estimates the balance between exercise and rest and gives you a recommendation on whether you need a recovery day or can continue with it. I especially like the morning report, which tells you how well you’re sleeping, what the weather is like, and whether it’s setting up to be a performance or recovery day.

The only health feature I’m a bit skeptical about is the exercise reminder. You get a friendly reminder when you’ve been sitting for too long, but there’s actually no information about how often you should move or what it takes to reset the so-called inactivity stack. It would be nice to see this bar in the system, but it’s like a black box that only sends out happy shouts from time to time.

The watch also contains breathing exercises and is in the process of training. They use the watch’s speaker for voice instructions (or a headset if you’ve connected it via Bluetooth) and text on the screen, which is a bit unwieldy.

Garmin’s Connect app is a really nice addition to the watch, as you see your health and training information organized into a calendar in an educational way. Here you can also set which apps are allowed to send notifications to the watch. It’s easy to get carried away if you’re not limited, but you can reply to messages directly from the watch with preset text phrases. You can also take out the keyboard and type messages like on an old push-button phone, but maybe it’s time to take out the mobile phone instead.

With Garmin Pay, you can make payments using the watch, and Swedish bank support is good. You can download playlists from Spotify and listen to music without carrying your mobile phone. The last option requires you to install the Garmin Connect IQ app store on your mobile phone. Here you will also find a large number of watch faces in addition to the ones that come pre-installed in the watch. The range of third-party apps for exercise is not insignificant.

It would be wrong to say that the Garmin Venu 3 breaks new ground for smartwatches, and it’s a bit expensive for what you get, but Garmin found a very good balance between features, great UI and battery life that made me choose this watch for both the Apple Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch.