Garmin Venu 3 Silver Stainless Steel Bezel 1.4-Inch AMOLED Touchscreen Display Smart Watch with 45mm Whitestone Case and Silicone Band

Functional, Spiffy, Sleek, and Most Important…..USEFUL !!
This is my 1st purchase of a Garmin Smartwatch. I had several Fitbits in the past 10 years and I was pretty much satisfied with just using the basics of that simpler watch. Music, payments, advanced workouts, messages, all the rest – I never used my watch for those functions.I was looking for a smartwatch to count my daily steps, track heartrate (see why below), quickie weather forecasts, a few stock quotes, oh yeah…and the time. That was pretty much the limits of my Fitbit usage. So having those plus a bunch of other simple apps or glances (Garmin’s terms for simple and oft-used apps), I was more than happy. The Garmin Venu 3S does all of this and more. If you want to do music, videos, payments, and lots of other features the Venu 3S can do those too, but that’s not my bag, as Austin Powers once said.The glances features are pretty easy to navigate once you get comfortable with these app-like functions. The Body Battery function is interesting, combining data from several apps to determine how much energy your body has or needs. Sleep Score is also useful. I even found a nifty Sun & Moon app that gives me the time for sunrise/set and moonrise/set plus the Moon phase — useful for my daily activities and those days and nights when I pursue my astronomy hobby.I am especially pleased with the heart apps. I have several heart issues including HOCM (Hypertrophic Obstructive Cardiomyopathy) so being able to check my heart rate at rest and during rigorous walks is very important to me. The ECG and HRV Status apps are nice additional features to have (if you have an arrythmia check with your cardiologist/doctor before activating the ECG function). The Pulse Oximeter is also good to check upon during long walks or other strenuous activities.Battery life consistently averaging 10 days is fantastic, especially compared to Apple smartwatches that need to be recharged in under 2 days. My Fitbits could last 5 days but that meant bringing a charger for most vacations or longer times away from home. The Venu 3S is able to last 10 days right on the dot, and that included during the setup run when the watch was being used a lot more and downloading updates, glances, apps, etc. A battery saver option with a “sleep” mode will help you survive until you can get back to your home and charger, preserving battery life if you’re using the watch but running low on power.I got the Venu 3S instead of the brand new model 4S (which had just come out) because for someone not maxxing out on all the apps/glances/features, the 3S was more than enough for my needs. I didn’t see a revolutionary change from the Venu 3S to the 4/4s. If you are a person who lives more off their smartwatch than your smartphone, then perhaps the additional features and new OS (assuming no glitches) on the Garmin Venu 4 will be worth it. At an extra 20% in cost, make sure you need the latest features or it’s an unnecessary expenditure.Net-Net: this is a really nifty smartwatch for the advanced or beginner smartwatch user. The interface is very nice…swiping is easy and seamless….button navigation also very simple…the watch face colors are bright and easy to see even in direct sunlight. The 41mm size is fine for me (I’m under 6 feet tall) and most people, but if you like having an oversized watch or are a bigger person with a bigger wrist, than the 45mm size of the Venu 3 might be better for you.Very happy with my Garmin Venu 3S and if my prior experience with their GPS car navigation systems holds, I should have many years of trouble-free usage ahead of me.

Sooooo much better than Fitbit!!!
I absolutely love this! I have been a Fitbit person almost since they came out years ago. Since they were acquired by Google, quality has really gone down. The latest app update was horrible, I absolutely hate the Fitbit app now, so started looking for other alternatives. This watch is great! It is so easy to set up, very fast to get it up and going, and it’s way more accurate than Fitbit. I suspected hat Fitbit was cheating me out of a lot of zone minutes in yoga, as well as in running. Where I was only getting about 11 zone minutes for power yoga on my Fitbit, I now get 40 on Garmin, which made a lot more sense to me. Heart rate is way more accurate on the Garmin. I know when my heart rate is up, and Fitbit was missing it. I also wondered what food app I was going to use (not crazy about my fitness pal) but I decided to just keep using the Fitbit app for food. It’s easy enough to subtract food calories via Fitbit from total calorie expenditure via Garmin without much fuss. I do like the Fitbit app for logging food since I’ve been using it for years and all my food is already in there. I don’t mind staying with that. Garmin also has so many different apps that you can use, it’s really great and far better than any of the Fitbits I’ve had. I also love that it’s a smart watch, I can make calls, answer the phone, reply to texts etc. on my iPhone. For text replies, I just use Siri which is easily accessible by pressing the side button. Overall, the Garmin is much more accurate, easy to use, and the app is really nice looking and you get a ton of stats. It’s also easy to read and has a black background so it’s not glaring like the Fitbit app is now. Lots of different meditations, a ton of workouts that you don’t have to subscribe to get. So glad I decided to go with Garmin, highly recommend!

I bought this to replace my aging Fitbit Sense, which wasn’t charging well anymore. It had the promise of using the phone’s voice assistant, which was better than the Sense 2 which only has access to Alexa now. It’s Bixby given I’m on a Samsung phone, but it’s better than Alexa and it can control stuff on the phone remotely from the watch which is a cool bonus.I did not have any appreciation for the massive difference in health tracking between a Fitbit and a Garmin when I pressed Buy Now. Every feature of the Fitbit is here in some form, both subscription features like readiness score (recovery) and enhanced sleep metrics to all of the basic stuff. Lots of things that are restricted to while you’re asleep on the Fitbit work at all times on the Garmin, like respiration and blood oxygen. The sensor and LEDs on this are much bigger than on a fitbit and are much more sensitive to highs and lows in heart rate that fitbit can’t pick up. The stress detection and body battery features are really cool and seem accurate. Fitness age presents an unflattering but likely pretty accurate picture of my health after wearing the watch for a few days.Everything is customizable on the watch and in the Garmin app; there is even a feature to design your own watch face with a photo background of your choice and the placement of the watch elements and complications where you choose them. You can put what is important to you front and center and you can ignore anything you don’t care about. Both the watch and the app require a bit of messing around to get things looking the way you would like, but it’s easy and I had fun poking at the watch for hours making everything perfect. There are a LOT of pre made watch faces included with assorted complications, some of them configurable and some not. The one pictured is not configurable but it displays exactly the stats I want and looks good. There are several included faces that look great so you aren’t forced into their store right away.It is ironic that there is a working YouTube Music app for Garmin watches but not for the top of the line fitbits. I have loaded my likes playlist to the watch, which loaded almost 300 songs in the same order they are in on the YM app. This took a while and I left the watch plugged in while it downloaded over wifi. Connecting headphones was really easy and I set the “shortcut” swipe from left side to open the music player. I have used the watch to listen to music instead of my phone on some walks and it’s a great experience.I am very fond of this. It’s an upgrade in every way from a Fitbit Sense. It’s the Samsung phone of fitness trackers with all of the bells, whistles and options you could ask for and some you didn’t know you wanted before you got the watch. Worth the 600 bucks.

Amazing battery life. 7 day with one charge.Looks better than apple