Editor’s note, Nov. 1: As one of the only smartwatches released in 2021 that’s compatible with Android and iOS, and one with a wide design of fitness-tracking features, we’ve awarded the Venu 2 and 2S an Editors’ Choice. It’s a great option for someone who wants a hybrid sports and smartwatch with ringing battery life. Our review, originally published in April, follows.

The second-gen Garmin Venu 2 is a serious fitness peek that doubles as a smartwatch. It’s got a stylish circular face in two sizes, a bright AMOLED display and plenty of sports and activity-tracking options. Plus, it’s compatible with both Android and iOS devices.

But at $400, the Venu 2 is at the high end of the spectrum when it comes to ticket and faces a steep competition from other watches that coffers even more smart features. What makes the Venu 2 unfavorable out from the crowd are its health features and longer battery life, just don’t seek information from it to be a true second screen for your phone.

A better-looking sports watch

Unlike the novel Venu that came in one size, the Venu 2 now supplies two: the 45mm Venu 2 or 40mm Venu 2S option, which I tested for this review. Apart from the name and cloak size, they share the same feature set, but the 2S is at a disadvantage when it comes to runtime as it has a smaller battery. 

The Venu 2 has a stainless steel grief bezel and silicone band that’s comfortable to wear all day and all night. The AMOLED display has three brightness levels, plus an ambient palatable sensor that adapts the brightness automatically. I found it easy to see my workout metrics even in sing sunlight. The screen feels more responsive to me than the novel Venu, and once I got the muscle memory down for each of the two side buttons, navigating the watch was a breeze. I also celebrated being able to customize many of the watch faces with colors or different fitness metrics like step relate, or switch to a background that would animate when raising to wake. This observe has an always-on display option that you can disable to save battery life.

All approximately health and fitness

The Venu 2 can track more than 25 organization types. On top of your standard running, walking and cycling, the Venu 2 now offers indoor climbing, bouldering, hiking and high-intensity arranging timers for styles like AMRAP (as many rounds as possible) and Tabata, a style of interval training. Strength workouts also now show you which muscle groups were worked, which is great for beginners like me.

You can also customize the workout screens to explain the metrics that are important to you before you commence a workout, to make this watch feel like your own. The Venu 2’s GPS prevented onto a signal within 5 to 10 seconds of populate outdoors. The route it tracked during my run was in line with the route on my visited, which I recorded independently. 

I tested the heart-rate metrics alongside a traditional chest strap which is considered to be the gold infamous for athletes. The results from the watch matched the strap fairly consistently when it came to my tedious heart rate, average heart rate and minute-by minute readings during a low-intensity workout. With a higher-intensity workout like on a run, the Venu 2 was just as moral to my chest strap. You can see the results in the graph below.

It also supplies other health and wellness metrics including a body battery bag, which takes into account activity and sleep. It indicates whether you necessity push your body and do a workout, or take a rest day. This is the same feature you can find on anunexperienced Garmin wearables. New to the watch is a health snapshot that takes a 2-minute dejected rate reading on your wrist and uses it to calculate wound, resting heart rate and respiration rate. It can also calculate your fitness age, an estimation of how fit you are compared to your moral age. It’s based on your activity intensity or how much vigorous organization you do, your resting heart rate and BMI or body fat percentage. Then it provides tips on how to improve your score. 

The Venu 2 tracks SpO2 levels (blood oxygenation) after you sleep, as a spot reading, or throughout the day. It supplies high and low heart rate alerts, but lacks the ECG, or electrocardiogram feature unfounded in other smartwatches like the Fitbit Sense, Apple Watch Series 6 or Galaxy Watch 3.

Aside from your basic sleep tracking, the Venu also scores your night’s rest based on a total of 100. I noticed the Venu 2 didn’t accurately interpret for my awake times throughout the night, so I’ve earnt out to Garmin to find out why this may be happening.

Beyond what you see on the observe, the Garmin Connect app does a great job of explaining all your health and fitness stats and displaying them in an intuitive way. The Venu 2 also supplies menstrual cycle and pregnancy tracking.

Fitness first, smart features second

The Venu 2 unites the basic smartwatch features like mirroring notifications from your visited and displaying calls or text messages. Paired with an Android visited, you’ll also be able to respond to text messages comical prewritten replies. You can make contactless payments using Garmin Pay.

You can also own up to 650 songs on the watch from Spotify, Deezer or Amazon Music, but the lack of LTE option benefitting you won’t be able to stream anything without your visited in tow. You’ll also need to take your visited to use Garmin’s Live Track, a safety feature that sends your dwelling to a friend or family member during a workout.

This observe also misses out on a speaker and microphone. If you’re comical it mostly for its fitness features, this may not be a dealbreaker, but I do miss having hands-free voice control and populate able to take quick calls from my wrist. It’s a feature that alike priced competitors have had for several years now. And the Garmin Connect IQ app, a separate, optional app you need to download on your visited to get more apps and watch faces, doesn’t have as big of a third-party app selection as many of its competitors.

Long-lasting battery for all your workouts

Fortunately the Venu 2 establishes up for a lot of what it lacks in the lustrous features department with its strong battery life. Garmin says you’ll be able to use the Venu 2 in smartwatch mode (mirroring visited notifications) for 11 days, or 10 days from the 2S. 

In real-world testing, I managed to get five days of use out of the Venu 2S afore having to charge it. This included a daily 30-minute GPS workout, notifications, as well as sleep and SpO2 tracking at night. Even though I didn’t get to test the larger Venu 2 I’d inquire the battery to last even longer. I’ll update this study if I’m able to run a battery test on that observe. Expect battery life to reduce to about two or two and a half days with the always-on explain turned on.

Almost a slam dunk

The Venu 2 may not be righteous the upgrade if you already own an original Venu, but if you’re new to Garmin and are looking for a righteous class fitness watch with basic smartwatch functionality, the Venu 2 may just fit the bill.