This definitely could be my new everyday watch. I really like the garmin venue 2 and in this video we have a lot to talk about from accuracy, testing to an interface tour and, of course, talking about the internals and the physical design of this device. But before i get into why i really like it, i want to start off, like i said, with some of the basics: let’s take a look at the physical design of the garmin venue, 2s, so the 2 and the 2s. The first confusion point right there: the 2 is just the regular larger version, the 45 millimeter and then the 2s. I assume s stands for small, because it’s, just slightly smaller there’s, really no differences in features or really anything about it, other than a subtle difference. In the aesthetic of it and, of course, the difference in size now the different size means you have a slightly smaller screen, a slightly lighter device and a slightly smaller battery, but really that’s the extent of that. So right here we have the garmin venue, 2s and we’re just going to look at this one for now and for the most part, assume that the venue 2 is essentially an identical device. Looking at the front you’ll see that we have kind of a gold color, stainless steel bezel around the display. The display is 1.1 inches and it is a really nice bright, amoled display. As far as the screen to body ratio goes, i think garmin did a really nice job of of making this look as aesthetically pleasing as possible from the chamfered bezel and the stainless steel to the little hour markings on the black bezel there.
I think they did a good job, and i know at this point it’s. 20 21 people might be wondering why we can’t close that gap. I believe the main reason that we’re having that black bezel around the screen is for contactless nfc payments, which obviously this device does have more on that later in the video. But the display overall is really bright, very vibrant, very responsive and of course it is a touch screen as well. So i really like the display i’ve had no problem seeing this in the brightest daylight or in the dimmest situations. Looking on the right side, you’ll see that we have two buttons: they don’t rotate. They don’t do anything crazy, not an ekg, just just two buttons. We don’t have a microphone on here. We don’t have a speaker on here, but overall, a really nice, simple, lightweight design. On the back, you can see that the silicone straps are really easy to take off and it’s a really nice soft touch rubber on the inside, but more of a hard textured rubber on the outside. So nice, aesthetic on the outside nice comfort on the inside. I really like how these straps are designed, of course, on the back. You can see we have our charging nodes right there, so the wire just kind of snaps into place – and you can hang this from the wire it’s – a nice powerful clip not too strong easy to pull off, of course.
But if you have an outlet that’s higher up, you could just hang this there and you don’t have to worry about setting your watch or balancing it on anything in the middle. You can see our array of heart rate, sensors and all kinds of different stuff. We’Ll talk about the sensors in a second, but you can see a big cluster of a lot of very impressive sensors there. Otherwise this is five atmospheres: water resistant, which means you can go swimming with this, maybe a little bit of snorkeling. I wouldn’t go diving with it, of course, but water resistance i’ve had no problem with this from my testing. So far now, as far as colors go, you got some options. You have four options for the venue 2s and only two options for the venue too. The venue 2 options both look really similar. The 2s has some really nice looking options a little bit more on the feminine side, probably but still really really nice looking devices and, of course, i’ll leave a link in the top of the description. If you guys want to go and see what’s actually in stock, the reason that we have this one right here, the venue 2s – is because it’s so hard right now to actually get the venue 2.. These are just flying off the shelves and they’re out of stock. In pretty much every store, i’ve checked so that’s pretty much it for the physical design of this device overall, very, very comfortable watch and aesthetically.
I think they did a fantastic job here, but let’s talk a little bit more about what’s under the hood. The internals of this watch are obviously very important, and the first thing you want to know about is the battery life. Now they claimed you’re going to get 10 days of battery life in smart watch mode, which is basically what you’re going to be doing with this. And if you have the venue 2, you get an extra day so 11 days, because again it has a larger battery. But that wasn’t quite what i was getting now, of course, that’s the claim, if you’re just doing smart watch mode. I was running this pretty heavy. I was really putting a lot of demand on this, using it for at least 30 minutes a day for gps on exercises. I also had 24 hour pulse ox monitoring on sleep monitoring, heart rate monitoring, like i had everything pretty much maxed out, including the brightness as well. They’Re, now still very comfortably getting five to six days of battery life. So, as far as battery life goes, i know it didn’t quite meet the full 10 days with with my strenuous use on here, but still i was really impressed with that and it’s already more than triple the best apple watch you can buy and honestly, if you Still struggle with battery life, this watch has quick charging, which is something i wish more watches would adopt, and in just 10 minutes you can get an entire day of battery with this device.
So that means, if you just hop in the shower in the morning, get out dry off and then unplug your watch you’re ready to go for at least an entire day, as i mentioned before, this also has contactless payment. So nfc on here is really nice to have garmin pay doesn’t really integrate with every card out there i found is a little bit more limited, but all things considered, once you find a card that works with it, it is very easy to use. We also have bluetooth on here, of course, to connect to your phone and we have wi fi as well, but bluetooth also connects to different earbuds. So if you want to go for a run without your phone, which is what i really like to do, you can have offline music on here. Go for a run, have earbuds connected to your watch and listen to spotify offline. As long as you have premium and it’s a feature that a lot of watches don’t have it’s really a great feature, i love to see it on garmin watches and speaking of running when it comes to tracking. With this watch, we have a plethora of sensors on board, including gps, glonass and galileo, so those are the three kind of positioning systems you’re going to be using there. We also have the garmin elevate, wrist heart rate, monitor on the back, definitely more advanced than most other on the market. Of course, i’ll get into a full test in a second, we have a barometric altimeter, a compass, a gyroscope, accelerometer, thermometer, ambient light sensor and, of course, the pulse ox sensor for blood oxygen saturation.
So a lot of sensors on this watch definitely geared more towards the athlete anybody looking to be more involved in their fitness or just getting healthier in general, and when we get into the actual testing, as you guys can see right here, we’ll start off with the Gps, honestly, this is the easiest one i’ve probably ever done, it’s just it’s, really accurate. Every run. I’Ve done with this is like right on the money getting exactly the right distance. I will say that when you’re running the instantaneous speed is usually complete garbage. I would not rely on that, but in the end, looking at the final length you went the average pace for each for each mile, it’s just a great. It really does a great job. We have almost no drunk wandering on this map and i was impressed with that now when it comes to heart rate monitoring. This is probably as good as you’re going to get right now with a wrist optical heart rate sensor. Obviously, if you want the most accurate you’re going to get like a heart rate band like the polar h10 for example, and when i compared them side to side you’ll see that for the most part, the garmin did a pretty good job. It was definitely really close, but keep in mind if you have there’s a lot of variables that could mess up an optical heart rate sensor. If you have too much hair on your wrist, if you’re, if you’re wearing it a little bit too close to your wrist joint, if you’re wearing long sleeves there’s a couple things that could mess that up.
But all things considered when you have this fitting correctly and you go for a run or any workout it tracks really really accurately. So, as far as sensors go, i was more than impressed with the accuracy of the garmin venue 2s and it kind of sets it apart from a lot of other fitness based smart watches. Now, as far as software goes there’s, a ton of features on here i’m going to get into in a second. But it syncs up really well with the garmin connect app on your phone with a ton of in depth analytics on all of your different workouts and just your health in general, and that syncs up really well with online. You can go to garmin connect on your browser on your desktop or your laptop and again there. You can see really really nice in depth, analytics of all of your different workouts to export that or do whatever you really want all right now, taking a look at the interface, the button on the top will bring you into a workout. If you tap on the four squares, you can choose between a ton of different workouts, as you can see a very smooth, seamless screen here and if we go into say like yoga. For example, you can actually swipe up and see a lot of different workouts. So if we choose like yoga for runners, it’ll give us an entire yoga workout and when we start that we’ll press on the top right button – and it does have that haptic motor on there, no speaker.
But it does vibrate and as if we swipe up from the top from the bottom, you can go down and see a whole bunch of things, including what the position is actually supposed to look like and, as you can see here, it gives you nice little animations. Throughout the entire workout, if we press the bottom right button, that is our home button and our back button and from the home screen. If we swipe from the right you’ll see that we actually have nothing there, not a great use of that. But if we swipe from the left, you’ll get a shortcut i didn’t set this up yet because i wanted to show you guys that that’s, where that would be, and if we swipe up or down it, goes through a loop of all your little widgets. You can set these in the app on your phone, but i really like how these are more compact, a little bit smaller and you can go into any one of these or see multiple at the same time. So it shows you like the music you’re playing how many notifications you have all kinds of things, and if i want to go and check out like, for example, my body battery or my heart rate, i could tap on that. It shows me a graph of my heart rate. I could swipe up and see the average heart rate by day and there’s, just a lot of analytics for each individual widget pressing the bottom button brings you back and you can again dig into any one of these.
Your sleep, for example, it’ll, show you the sleep from last night. Give you a sleep score, and it gives you some reasoning as to why your sleep might not be good. So this was good sleep right here, but if it wasn’t it would give me a little notification and tell me that maybe i rolled around too much and so that’s pretty much it for the interface it’s, really really simple. If we press and hold the bottom button, we can go into some settings here, so we can change the watch face. We can set like an alarm or a stopwatch or a timer, or we can go into our history that’s the settings right there. If we tap and hold the top button, it’s actually going to bring us into this little cool shortcut interface. Here we can go to garmin, pay, spotify location, we can go and just set a timer and you can preset whatever you want on the outside and of course these are all going to be your quick settings. You also get notifications on this watch and if you have an android, you actually have quick replies as well and, of course you can answer or reject phone calls, but without a speaker or a microphone it’s not going to be actually answering it on your watch now, With that being said, guys, the watch overall pros and cons the pros, obviously the accuracy, the comfort and the aesthetics. Those are the big three of why you would want this watch you’re getting a great battery life as well, and i found that a lot of things work well like lift to wake works really well.
I found that the touchscreen is definitely responsive, it’s very bright it’s, not the best out there, but it’s definitely a major step up from something like the garmin venue sq from last year with the lcd display. The amoled really does a great job, but of course not everything is good about this. There were some drawbacks. I found some of them included. The gps definitely takes a beat until you’re, able to start running, it’ll say wait for gps, sometimes for 30 seconds to a minute, depending on where you are but that’s kind of the cost of accuracy. Other devices that just say start running won’t be as accurate. So i don’t really mind that, but i found that the instantaneous speed is kind of trash. It really doesn’t do a great job, and so i would pretty much just disregard that the price is a huge, huge drawback. This is costing about ‘9. There might be sales it’s very likely there will be sales, but at that price you’re talking about, i mean a mid range phone. An apple watch like a lot of other devices, can be bought for ‘9 bucks. This, of course, is arguing that it is different because it’s so much more accurate, much more fitness oriented. It gives you better analytics, but all things considered ‘9 bucks is ‘9 bucks, that’s a drawback for this device. We also have limited third party apps. We don’t have any kind of type of rotating bezel rotating crown.
I really wish we had that and of course we don’t have a microphone or speaker so it’s not going to compete head to head with the with the galaxy watch or the apple watch. But, of course, it kind of has a different approach, and that brings me to the on this. One: smart watches in general are still kind of trying to find their place in the world they’re trying to find their purpose, but one purpose. That is definitely a real one is for fitness there’s, an entire category of sports watches, but a lot of people don’t necessarily want a big clunky sports watch with a weird interface. A lot of people want a good smart watch. That is also a master of sport. Watch so when you find that hybrid right in the middle you end up with things like the fitbit sense, the fitbit versa, 2 versus a 3 and, of course, the garmin venue and in the entire realm. I think it’s very easy to say that this one is hands down my favorite. It is the most accurate, the easiest to use and overall just definitely my favorite device – that kind of mashes up the best of the smartwatch world. The fundamentals that i need and the best of the fitness tracking, so whether that’s offline spotify connected to your earbuds or a contactless payment to buy a gatorade after a run, this device honestly might be my daily watch that i’m wearing every single day.
Just because i really like tracking my health and tracking it very accurately so is, is gon na, be my my main watch for the entire year i’m, not sure, but i can say that for now, i’m gon na be wearing this watch every day. You guys can leave a comment below and let me know what you think of the garmin venue 2 and venue 2s.IWz539gYDVE
