I review Garmin Watches for a living, and this is the watch face I always install
It's wonderfully clean and simple to look at, and while it can be a little fiddly to download on the Garmin Connect IQ store, once it's loaded onto your watch, customizing the data fields is a breeze.
Right now, the Rondo watch face is available on most of the current Garmin watches, including the Fenix, Epix, Forerunner, Instinct, and Venu lines. It particularly stands out on the new Garmin Forerunner 570 and Garmin Forerunner 970 thanks to their bright, beautiful AMOLED displays. You can read more on how to update your Garmin watch face here.
Of course, every runner will have their preference when it comes to watch faces. My colleague Nick, for example, loves this techy-looking free Garmin watch face, but here's why I'd recommend Rondo:
The data fields on the Rondo watch face are completely customizable, allowing you to decide which information you see when you glance down at your watch. You can choose to be directed to some of Garmin's best health features, including body battery, stress level, or recovery time, or just see calories and steps if you'd rather.
Once you've locked your data fields in, you can press and hold down on a metric if you're using one of the newer Garmin devices with a touchscreen, and be taken to an overview.
You can also customize the color scheme of the watch face to suit your style.
Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips.
Even when the display is dimmed, it's easy to see the time on the Rondo face thanks to it's large, clear numbers. By contrast, even in the brightest sunlight, I've found it easy to see this screen, especially on the newer, AMOLED watches.
Garmin's watches typically have a pretty impressive battery life, and during testing, I've not found this custom screen to be a drain on the battery. Overall, this is a colorful way to give your Garmin watch an update. Sure, there's a slight cost, but you only have to download it once, so if you do upgrade your Garmin watch in the future, you'll be able to take your watch face with you.
Follow Tom's Guide on Google News to get our up-to-date news, how-tos, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Tom's Guide
43 minutes ago
- Tom's Guide
If you're moving from Apple to Garmin, you'll want to install this watch face
There's a lot to consider when moving from Apple Watch to Garmin — sure, you'll get a better battery life and more health tracking features, but one thing you might miss, as well as answering calls and texts from your wrist, is closing your rings. The good news is, you can still close your rings using this Garmin watch face. I review the best Garmin watches for a living, and while this is the watch face I always download, the Goals screen is super popular, and mimics Apple's rings. The best part is, unlike Apple, you can completely customize what your rings measure. Like all custom Garmin watch faces, you can download the watch face, named Goals, from the Connect IQ app. You can download a free trial of the watch face first, and then it will cost $1.99/£1.99. Once you've downloaded the face, you'll be able to move it from watch to watch, if you ever choose to upgrade your Garmin. Here's why I recommend it. I've been reviewing the best fitness trackers for the past decade, and I'm the first to admit, the Apple Watch rings are extremely motivating. Far more motivating than my watch randomly buzzing throughout the day, telling me to move. I've been known to go for a walk at 10 pm just to close my move ring, and the same applies with the Garmin goals, which I love seeing my move throughout the day. One big step up from the move, exercise, and stand rings you'll find on the Apple Watch is the ability to customize your goals to ones that are important to you. The goals watch face lets you pick from a huge list of stats, including all of the obvious options like steps, movement, and calories, but also more unique goals, such as floors climbed, monthly walking minutes, and time to recover in hours. As a marathon runner, it's always helpful to see my active calories — a stat you can't see on most of Garmin's built-in watch faces. This helps me ensure I'm eating enough when my training plan involves high mileage runs. If you're looking to lose weight, it's also a helpful metric to keep an eye on, as you want to ensure you're in a calorie defict, burning more calories than you consume. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. I've installed the Goals watch face on my Garmin Forerunner 570, Garmin Forerunner 970, and Garmin Epix Pro, and have not experienced any difference in battery life while using it. It looks fantastic on the bright, AMOLED screen, and I appreciate the option to customize the colors of the bars to suit my style. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News to get our up-to-date news, how-tos, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.
Business Insider
17 hours ago
- Business Insider
Garmin Venu 3 review: A great fitness tracker, but it falls short as a smartwatch
For the last four months, I've been testing the best Garmin watches available. The Venu 3 is Garmin's most advanced smartwatch yet, and it's built on the same top-tier fitness foundation the brand is known for. In addition to having a built-in microphone and speaker, it has best-in-class GPS, industry-leading heart rate tracking, and deep recovery metrics. During testing, I found the ability to answer calls and texts from my wrist was nice, but the advantages felt pretty limited in this model. Moreover, if your goal is to track workouts, stay on top of your stress and sleep, and see who's texting or emailing you without your phone nearby, I think the Vivoactive 6 is going to be a better pick — at a better price — for the majority of people looking for a smart fitness watch. (Check out our full Vivoactive 6 review.) While the Venu 3 is all-in-all a solid watch, after testing it for the last few months, I don't think it's the best value for your money. Here's why. What I found after 3 months of testing It's built on Garmin's fitness tracking power. Garmin has some of the best fitness tracking technology, based on a long-standing foundation of very accurate GPS and heart rate detection. With this core, the Venu 3 has a lot of the same features and abilities that make Garmin's other lifestyle watches great for fitness devotees: it tracks your steps, sleep, and stress automatically; has 30 pre-loaded activity profiles you can manually use to track workouts with helpful in-the-moment stats like heart rate, pace, and distance; it uses your health and activity data to determine your "body battery" energy and recovery levels throughout the day; and it has a digital coach for training and improving your sleep. Every morning, the Venu 3 delivers a morning report with sleep quality, body battery, and a daily suggested workout. And, like most every Garmin watch, the face and data fields are fully customizable in the app so you can tweak the watch to match your needs. It's sleek, intuitive, and has a great battery life. The Venu 3, like most Garmin models, has many other perks than the foundational tech: It has an exceptionally long battery life (14 days in smartwatch mode, or 26 hours in GPS mode), which means you can more continuously track sleep and daytime stress, and you can leave your charger behind for short travels. The AMOLED display is crisp and vivid, the interface intuitive, and the case design more refined than past Garmin watches (though it looks very similar to the Vivoactive 6). You can customize the watch face so it looks as sporty or as sleek as you prefer. I also appreciate that it comes in two sizes, the smaller Venu 3S with a 41mm screen and the Venu 3 with a 45mm screen. It's a smarter watch…sort of. The biggest headline that sets the Venu 3 apart from Garmin's other watches is that it has a built-in microphone and speaker. This means you can take calls and use your phone's voice assistant directly from your wrist — something the Vivoactive 6 and Garmin's less-smart watches can't do. On one hand, I found this feature genuinely convenient during moments like taking quick "need anything on my way home" calls from my husband, or replying to a text while hands-deep in pie crust. A quick voice reply definitely beats tracking down my phone for a short answer or trying to swipe with messy fingers. I also found the voice-to-text feature worked just as well (if not better) than using Siri to dictate. That said, there's a big catch: your phone has to be unlocked for you to do anything beyond responding to an incoming text or answering a call. Unlike with, say, an Apple Watch, the Venu 3 can't initiate a text to someone, reply to a text from earlier in the day, or even add something to your Notes app without your phone being unlocked first. I found this to be quite frustrating; this limitation really narrowed how often the on-wrist reply function was actually usable. The voice assistant access was also finicky — sometimes I'd press and hold the middle button and it would say "connecting to voice assistant," only to immediately go back to the home screen. In short, it's not quite the seamless smart assistant experience you get from an Apple Watch or Galaxy Watch. If you're an Android user, you have a little more to work with: You can access quick-reply features, and these only need Bluetooth, not voice assistant, so you can shoot a pre-set canned reply even if your phone is locked. Why it's not worth $150 more than the Garmin Vivoactive 6 Having tested both of these watches over the last three months, I can tell you Garmin's two smartwatches are very, very similar. The main difference: The Venu 3 is slightly smarter but also significantly more expensive than the Vivoactive 6. Here's what $150 more will get you with the Venu 3: Ability to take phone calls on-wrist. Ability to use voice assistant and reply to incoming texts on-wrist. Ability to initiate pre-set texts on an Android on-wrist. 14 days of battery life vs. 11 days in the Vivoactive 6. 30 preloaded activity profiles vs. 80 in the Vivoactive 6. Slightly higher display resolution. A built-in barometric altimeter for more accurate elevation tracking. In my opinion, unless you take quick phone calls a lot or use voice assistant all the time (and have your phone unlocked to do so), the Vivoactive 6 is a much better value for your money. How it compares to other smart watches If you are more interested in having a great smartwatch that does a good-enough job at tracking workouts, then your decision is really between the Garmin Venu 3, the Apple Watch Series 10, and the Google Pixel Watch 3. (After testing the Fitbit Versa 4, I can confirm it doesn't have a seat at this table.) All three watches are a similar price ($400 to $500), have a sleek and clean design, and have an intense, visually rich display (the Venu 3 and Pixel 3 use AMOLED, while the Apple Watch 10 uses retina OLED). The Venu 3 has a significantly longer battery life (14 days vs. 18-24 hours), a far more accurate GPS, and far more accurate heart rate sensor than either competitor. Overall, this means the Venu 3 is going to be better at tracking your health and fitness and delivering deeper, more insightful metrics than the Apple Watch Series 10, including personalized coaching for free in the Garmin app. That said, the Apple Watch Series 10 does a good enough job at tracking workouts for most people (and auto-tracks them, which Garmins do not), is very good at analyzing sleep, and is way better at being a smartwatch for iPhone users compared to the Venu 3. The Apple Watch integrates better with the iPhone ecosystem, so you have more apps on-wrist (including navigation from Apple Maps), access to Siri, and voice control without needing to unlock your phone. You will have to charge it every 1-2 days, though. The Pixel Watch 3, meanwhile, integrates much better with the Android ecosystem than the Venu 3 — you can access more apps and Google Assistant from your wrist versus just receiving notifications and responding to texts and phone calls. The Pixel Watch is built on Fitbit's technology, so its workout and sleep tracking are pretty good, though it can't compete with Garmin's GPS or recovery insights. And, like the Apple Watches, the Pixel 3 needs to be charged every 1-2 days versus the Venu 3's 14-day battery life. For more picks, check out our guide to the best smartwatches and best fitness trackers. The bottom line The Venu 3 may be Garmin's most advanced smartwatch, but it's not $150 smarter than the Vivoactive 6. While it's nice to have an on-wrist speaker and mic sometimes, the need to unlock your phone for access is too much of a limitation for us to justify spending $450 on this watch. If fitness is your priority, the Vivoactive 6 is a great wearable with basic smartwatch functions (e.g., on-wrist notifications, Garmin Pay, music control) and way more activity profiles, all at a more affordable price than Apple or Google watches. However, if an advanced smartwatch is your priority, you may be happier with an Apple Watch Series 10 or Google Pixel 3 for a similar price to the Venu 3.
Tom's Guide
18 hours ago
- Tom's Guide
Your Nespresso machine might have a secret 'Expert Mode' setting — here's how it works
Nespresso's Vertuo line offers a huge range of drink sizes at the touch of a button. Its smart tech automatically adjusts dispensing time depending on your pod of choice, extracting the ideal amount of coffee for the size and roast of your Nespresso capsule automatically. But you might wish you could override that smart tech from time to time. Perhaps you have some XL pods lying around, but prefer espresso-based drinks. Or maybe you just discovered a new favorite Nespresso flavor, but it's not available in your go-to drink size. It's a hidden feature, but your Nespresso machine may well allow you to override its pre-set dosing, and it couldn't be easier to use. The setting is called "Expert Mode", and it's available on a selection of Vertuo machines. Here's how it works. If you have a Nespresso Original machine, the answer is no. These machines will only brew a single or double shot as standard, but some do allow you to change the dose size depending on your preferences. But if you have a Nespresso Vertuo machine, your machine probably will work with Expert Mode. Expert Mode is available on the following machines: The only Vertuo machine it won't work on is the Nespresso Vertuo Plus (pictured above), which is the brand's earliest iteration of its Vertuo line, and doesn't come with the more up-to-date settings. If you have a compatible machine, all you need to do to activate Expert Mode is allow the machine to heat up, and then double-press the brew button. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. When you do this, the button should flash blue, which indicates that you've successfully switched the setting on. From there, your machine will brew a more concentrated shot of your pod automatically. This is especially ideal for the summer months, where you may want to enjoy an espresso-based iced coffee but find yourself stuck with oversized pods that brew a long, hot mug of Joe. It also brews a more concentrated drink by default, which is a win for those who need a strong coffee to kickstart their morning. The size of the drink your machine will brew in Expert Mode is still dependent on the size of the pod you've used. According to Nespresso, the setting is designed for those who want to pair their favorite blends with milk-based drinks like latte or cappuccinos. That means it will brew a smaller shot of coffee in order to leave room in your mug for some steamed milk. The pod will brew as follows: Did you know about this extra Nespresso feature? Follow Tom's Guide on Google News to get our up-to-date news, how-tos, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.
