I raced 5 miles with the Apple Watch Ultra 2 vs. Garmin Venu X1 — here's the winner

Tom's Guide

5 hours ago

The Apple Watch Ultra 2 has long been one of the best smartwatches for runners, but it still doesn't quite match the best Garmin watches for sports features.
However, the gap between smart and sports watches grows smaller year by year, and the Garmin Venu X1 is a clear attempt by Garmin to tap into the Apple Watch audience more.
It has a vast 2-inch AMOLED display and a thinner design than any Garmin I've tested. On the wrist, it feels more like a smartwatch than a sports watch, even though it packs in almost all of Garmin's top sports tracking features.
To compare the Garmin Venu X1 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 directly, I wore both for a 5-mile race in the Essex countryside in the UK, examining their design, accuracy, and battery life.
The new Garmin Venu X1 packs most of Garmin's key sports tracking and training analysis features into a very slim smartwatch with a huge AMOLED display. Its square design certainly brings to mind the Apple Watch Ultra 2, and the Venu X1 has some useful smart features like music storage and NFC payments.
The Apple Watch Ultra 2 is the flagship smartwatch in the brand's range, but with the Apple Watch Ultra 3 rumored to arrive this fall, you can usually find the Ultra 2 in sales somewhere. This modest discount at Amazon is on the black titanium version of the watch with the trail loop, which is the most comfortable Apple Watch strap for runners in my experience.
I finished the race in 26:01, and both watches were pretty much spot on with their accuracy. However, there were definitely differences I noticed in their design and how they performed on race day.
The thinness of the Garmin Venu X1 makes it feel very light and unobtrusive on the wrist, despite the fact that it has such a large screen.
It felt lighter than the Apple Watch Ultra 2 during the race, and despite how thin it is, the Venu X1 doesn't feel flimsy at all, thanks to the titanium case back and sapphire screen.
The Apple Watch Ultra 2 is a very good-looking watch. The way the titanium case surrounds its screen might well make it more durable than the Venu X1, but the Garmin is lighter and feels better for running.
At the start of the race, I missed the button on the Apple Watch Ultra 2 to begin recording, but had only taken a few steps by the time I got it going, and both watches produced accurate tracks on the two-lap course out on countryside roads.
I track my runs in kilometers, and five miles is 8.05km, so both watches were very close to the correct distance — the race was Essex County's 5-mile championships and so had a licensed, accurately-measured course.
One notable thing about the GPS tracking on the two watches is that the Apple Watch Ultra 2 offers dual-band GPS tracking, a more accurate method that isn't available on the Venu X1, but is available on other Garmin models.
So far in testing, the all-satellite-systems tracking on the Venu X1 has been very accurate. On this course, on countryside roads with little tree cover, it was fine, but in city events where you're running around tall buildings, the dual-band tracking on the Apple would be beneficial.
To test the heart rate accuracy of the two watches during the race, I also wore a Garmin HRM600 chest strap connected to a Garmin Forerunner 970 in my pocket.
In my experience, chest straps are a more reliably accurate option for heart rate tracking than wrist sensors, so I could compare the readings from the Venu X1 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 to see if they matched.
For the most part, both watches performed very well for heart rate accuracy, matching up to the chest strap beat-for-beat for almost the entire race.
At the start of the race, it took a while for the reading of the Venu X1 to rise to the correct heart rate, and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 showed no heart rate reading at all for the first minute or two, but once both locked on to my heart rate they were accurate for the rest of the event.
The Apple Watch Ultra 2's battery life has been very consistent for me through years of testing, with the watch invariably lasting a couple of days of use, even when I ran a marathon with the watch.
Garmin watches usually outlast this comfortably, but not so the Garmin Venu X1, which has only been lasting me a day with the screen always-on. Garmin says it should last two days, but I'm losing about 10% of battery per hour during runs, including the 5-mile race, which is a faster drain rate than expected given the supposed 14 hours of GPS battery life.
This is with the brightness of the screen set to the lowest level, too (it's still more than bright enough). Unless you plan to have the Venu X1 screen on raise-to-wake, right now, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is the winner on battery life.
Garmin did launch an update for its Forerunner 570 and Forerunner 970 watches after they launched to improve battery life, so this could happen with the Venu X1 too, but right now, its big, bright screen is certainly having a huge impact on battery life.
If you're someone who prefers a square watch and prioritizes a bright display over long battery life, both of these watches fit the bill, and they back up those good looks with impressive sports tracking that's accurate and detailed.
The lightness of the Garmin Venu X1 makes it more comfortable on my thin wrist, and I prefer Garmin's sports tracking and training analysis to Apple's, because there's more detail and customization available.
During this race, however, it was a wash as to which performed better, with very similar distance, pacing and heart rate stats from both watches. You can certainly rely on either one on race day.