Garmin Venu Sq Review
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A powerful, multi-tasking smartwatch that delivers all the best bits for a bargain price. What’s not to love?!
Design:
The Garmin Venu Sq is a squirclar shape, with 2 physical side buttons. Though perhaps not the best looking of all the smartwatches, it’s nevertheless still pretty easy on the eye, especially when worn with one of our gorgeous Garmin Venu Sq Straps. Its LCD full colour screen provides a clear and crisp display, giving it an overall premium look and feel.
Functionality:
This little powerhouse packs a real punch tech-wise. When it comes to sports tracking, it gives you a wide range of activities to choose from, most of which have guided sessions available. When it comes to fitness tracking, it has all bases covered – steps, calories, active minutes, resting heart rate, the works. It has a heart rate sensor, SpO2 blood oxygen detection (during sleep as well as all-day pulse oximetry tracking) and a Body Battery function which estimates your energy levels using heart rate and exercise statistics, paired with sleep quality information. And, when it comes to wellbeing features, yep you guessed it, that’s another area the Garmin Venu Sq has well and truly covered - with in-built sleep tracking and mindfulness, breathwork and guided breathing modes to aid calmness and overall mental health. It even has the capability to study your body metrics and give you a single overall stress score, so you can work on making any necessary improvements.
To top it all off, the Garmin Venu Sq is water resistant, delivers well-formatted phone notifications and comes with Garmin Pay included. Music support is also included with the more expensive model, but it does come at a significant premium so it’s a judgement call as to whether or not it’s worth it.
Pros:
As you could probably guess from the above, I’m a big fan of this smartwatch. Not only does it have a lot to offer in terms of functionality, in my view it delivers on all its promises, giving a great performance in all areas. I found the fitness, heart rate and breathing rate tracking were all highly accurate, as was the sleep tracking, which gave a thorough breakdown of my sleep stages throughout the night, plus blood oxygen levels and respiration rate.
I was especially impressed with the Garmin Venu Sq’s focus on wellbeing, particularly the stress and energy level monitoring. Things have been pretty stressful for everyone lately, so these insights felt much needed for highlighting areas for improvement when it comes to feeling calmer. Body Battery is a brilliant feature and I loved having some guidance as to how hard to push myself, or to just take a break and chill out.
Team all that useful gadgetry with other key factors such as affordability, extensive battery life and a great companion app in Garmin Connect and you’ve got an excellent all-rounder of a smartwatch in the Garmin Venu Sq.
Cons:
It’s been established that I’m a fan, so I don’t have much to moan about here. That said, there are a couple of slight negatives. I found the interface a little fiddly to navigate at times and it didn’t give the best presentation either – not doing justice to the data by making it look a bit basic. Using the Garmin Connect app to view the features was a far superior and more user-friendly experience. The only other minor niggle is that some of the guided sports sessions were a tad too simplistic, offering only basic guidance which lacked any real depth or support.
Verdict:
Brilliant when it comes to the basic key features, plus lots of extra bits which were the cherry on the cake. The Garmin Venu Sq is a hard-working, multi-tasking little smartwatch which feels like the complete package. Sports tracking, fitness tracking, health and wellbeing features – Tick, tick and tick!