Garmin Venu Sq GPS Smart watch with LCD, Battery upto 6 Days, 24/7 HR, Advanced Sleep Monitoring, Stress tracking, Body Battery, Mindful Breathing,…

I have been a user of Apple Watch from last few months. I bought Garmin Venu Sq for my brother, who has an android phone. First of all, if you are an iPhone user, go for Apple Watch, as they work great in Apple ecosystem, sync seamlessly, has great display and user friendly UI.

Now coming to the Garmin Venu SQ, I will list out pros and cons.

PROs:
1) I had thoroughly researched about the accuracy of smartwatches, and found that Garmin is second only to Apple watches. Apple watches has near-industry level accuracy, whereas Garmin watches comes second. Fitbit comes a close 3rd, but with the constant nagging to get Fitbit premium, I did not even consider it. Samsung watches are good, but they are more of a smartwatch with few fitness functions, unlike Garmin which is basically a fitness device with few smartwatch functions. ACCURACY RATING: 9/10
2) Good enough sports modes, with customisable data fields for each mode. Tracking is expected to be accurate. SPORTS TRACKING: 9/10
3) Other measurement like body battery, stress level, steps were accurate enough for daily uses. 9/10
4) Battery life is good. Runs for roughly 5-6 days on average with continuous SpO2 tracking. BATTERY RATING: 9/10
5) Extremely well designed mobile application. Shows relevant information. Garmin Connect IQ store has decent collection of watch faces (round shape), widgets, apps, data fields, etc that can be downloaded. Extremely customisable to the point that you can even decide colours of data field. Apple should learn from it. APPS AND STORE RATINGS: 6/10 (Edit: After almost 1 year of use, now I am having issues with the syncing the data between mobile application and watch. Plus other brands have now caught up on application where they are no as good as Garmin. So decreasing this rating from 10 to 6) :/
6) Syncing of data is instantaneous between app and watch. Sometimes I did face some issues. for e.g. when I downloaded watch faces, it would queue it up for no reason and then take some 2-3 minutes for it to reflect on watch. But other than this, no issues. SYNC RATING: 9/10

CONs:
1) First of all, its display. The display looks like it is a watch from early 2010s. The LCD display looks so washed out that it is difficult to see even in normal indoor lighting despite maxed out brightness setting. Let’s not even talk about how it looks outdoor. I instantly hated the display the moment it was switched on. DISPLAY RATING: 3/10
2) One factor that could have compensated for the disappointing display is the watch faces. However, on the Garmin store, most of the watch faces is for round watches, not for square. If you install a watch face meant for round faces to Garmin Venu Sq, it gets stretched, and covers less that half of already small display size of Venu sq. All in all, there are hardly 5-6 watch faces that uses the whole screen on Venu Sq, but those faces are extremely “boring”. The few faces which are good and needs to be purchased, are not available for purchase in India. So the display that my brother is using is the standard one that comes pre-installed in watch – the washed out, hard to see display. WATCH FACES – 2/10 (particularly compared to it similarly priced Apple Watch Series 3 which has amazing watch face options with dynamic interactions)
3) I did not find sleep tracking to be very accurate. Many YouTubers had the same experience. However, I will not complain much here since my almost double expensive Apple Watch does not even have inbuilt sleep tracking and has to use 3rd party apps. SLEEP TRACKING – 7/10
4) SpO2 reading – not very accurate. Sometimes shows accurate reading, sometimes its off by 3-4 % age points. All in all, do not rely on this watch’s SpO2 reading and better to have a specialised device for that. (Again this is the issue with all SpO2 tracking smartwatches)
5) Garmin Pay is not available in India.
6) The raise-to-wake is decently responsive. But another biggest disappointment comes from double-tap to wake function. It doesn’t work half of the time. I have to double-tap 2-3 times to wake it once. Even then sometimes it doesn’t show anything. Then I have to press the physical button to wake it up. RESPONSIVENESS : 6/10
7) GPS sometimes doesn’t gets locked in. But this is extremely rare.
8) Other must have function like Flashlight is not present.

So should you buy it?
It depends on what you want, you age and preferences. Those of you who just want an accurate smartwatch and wants to get into “Garmin ecosystem”, but does not care about display quality, watch faces, UI interactiveness, can go for it. However, those who have seen the interactiveness of Apple watches, or Fitbit or Samsung galaxy and active watches, may fight this watch “boring”. If you have single minded focus of using this watch as a fitness device, then go for it. However, if you are looking for a smartwatch which can replace your mobile, take calls, reply texts, voice detection, this is not the watch for you.
If in the future, vibrant colours and watch faces get available in the Garmin store specifically designed for Venu SQ, then this watch can become a decent choice to buy.

Nice watch but too expensive and it doesn’t track all activities like rope jump and some others. Good for enthusiastic runners.

Ok

Its a very good watch with good gps accuracy. It supports GPS, Glonass, and Baidu. One thing which it lacks is screen size. It has very small screen size. Nevertheless, its a quite good smart watch.