6 days ago
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.
