My name is donovan and in today’s video we’re going to be talking about the garmin venue sq and my experience after using it for the past 72 hours. So, roughly around three days at this point and uh so far, there’s a lot of things i really like about it and a couple things that i definitely want to share. That may be be worth considering if you’re thinking about picking this thing up so let’s go ahead and talk about the build quality of this watch. So first thing: you’ll notice. When you look at it is of course it’s pretty glaring the fact that it’s a square watch face it’s been quite a while, since garmin made a square watch face and uh, there are some good things and some bad things about that. One of the good things, of course, is that it’s square it’s something new for garmin, at least in recent history, but with that, if you think about a lot of garmin watch faces, you get on something like the connect iq store. A lot of those watch faces because most garmin watches currently are circular. A lot of them are made with that circular design. So when you go ahead and put them on the watch, so let me just give you a quick example in order to change the watch. Face you can hold down here, go to watch face that’s. This is just one way you can do it and i’ll show you an example of one that was designed for a circular watch, but when you bring it on here, it doesn’t look particularly great.
So let’s go to this one right here, so there you go so that’s what it looks like so it’s, not terrible, but it’s also not ideal it’s, not what it’s really supposed to look like it’s, not filling up the entire display, so just something to consider uh. If you’re thinking about picking this one up, so this one is an lcd display versus the amoled display you get on the original garmin venue or sorry. The original garmin venue so here’s just a quick comparison of an amoled display versus an lcd it’s, definitely not as bright and vivid as what you would get on amoled display and also you’ll notice, probably that pretty significant bezel you get on here. So the screen is a lot smaller than the actual square here that you get on the entire watch face or the entire glass piece there. Now, as far as the build, we have an aluminum bezel here so made out of metal and then down here. This is all plastic. We have our heart rate sensor, same exact heart rate sensor as you. What what you get on something like my garmin, 400, 245 music same one, you get on the 45 and that is to say very, very good. It does have an spo2 sensor as well, so you can track that all day. So, if you’re someone who wants to know your blood oxygen oxygen levels, you can track that here on the watch you can see.
We do have the standard 20 millimeter, quick release bands. Just like what you get on something like the 400 245 music, so really like that, you can easily swap them out for something else. If you want their silicone so nice for running with, and then we have our two button configuration here similar to what you get on, something like the vivoactive uh, the vivoactive, 4 and 4s, and then also the garmin venue. So this one up here, this button is going to be a shortcut directly into your workouts and we can go into those or we can hit the back button so i’m going to go into the back button for now. We’Ll take a look at the workouts in just a little bit. If you hold this one down, you can get into your settings. So if you want to adjust some settings, you can do that here. Of course, you can do all this on the app as well, but if you want to do it directly from the watch, you can do it right here now. One thing i will mention just because this is important for a lot of people is, if you want to get the most accurate gps we’re going to slide down here. So we got the vibration motor, of course, and we’re going to do data recordings that’s, where you want to go so you can choose smart or every second. I always use it on every second, so i’m burning through a little bit more battery than the average person, but that is how you’re going to get the most accurate gps on there.
So, just something to point out here in the wrist based heart rate, just one more thing to point out: we have our broadcast and activity, so you can see, i have it turned off, but here’s where we’re going to get pulse ox and i have it tracking. All day so um, obviously, if you know it’s, it’s kind of more common it’s becoming a lot more common for people right now because of cover 19 and that affecting your blood oxygen levels. So if it’s, something you want to be able to check all day, that’s how you can do it on the garmin venue, sq all right, so we’ve talked about that um. If you hold this one down. This will also take you into your quick settings here. So we have do not disturb. We have our brightness. We can jump right into spotify there. You can adjust these in the settings as well. Here’S garmin pay, so you can of course use this for contactless payments. If we swipe to the left, you can see we’re going to take us into our shortcut, and i have my shortcuts set up for spotify music. Obviously you don’t have to have that you can change that to whatever shortcut you want simply by holding this down going into the settings, and here it is the shortcut i mentioned, that control menus earlier, so that’s how you’re going to adjust. What shows up on that controls menu by holding this one down here? So there you go there’s a little bit of the settings.
If we swipe down, we can go through our various widgets again fully customizable. You can change these to whatever widget you want so here’s. My body battery here’s my heart rate throughout the day here’s my most recent workouts. You can see i’ve done three workouts so far with it. So a couple runs yesterday today and then a treadmill run the day before so three workouts. So far, we’ll talk about the battery life in just a moment on those workouts get out of that and let’s see let’s actually go the opposite way so here’s my day. So just some quick settings to kind of show you what you’ve done so far today. So there’s my run so that’s, i think that’s my active minutes. Today we have number of steps and then calories burned and then some more health stats here as well so heart rate, stress level, body battery respiration and then back to that one. So this is our back button as well, taking us back to our home screen all right, so that pretty much covers everything on the interface of the watch. As far as the workouts let’s go ahead and walk through those so i’m going to show you a run. Real quick one of the limitations you get with this watch is because of that smaller square face there when you actually go into workout i’m, just going to go ahead and do it even though i don’t have gps, the gps is pretty quick to lock in.
I think about you know: average, maybe 10 to 20 seconds to lock in so i’m just going to go ahead and start. This is going to act as a lap button. This is our stop button. Obviously, it’s not going to get heart rate, but notice that i only have three different pieces of information on here. So that’s a little bit of a limitation, you can’t get more than three data pieces per screen and to switch them. You have to just basically slide through you can see. I have three total screens here, so i set this one up for laps. I set this one up for distance pace and heart rate so notice. I don’t have total time on there because that would be one. I would want to have, but i only get three data pieces so that’s a little bit of a limitation. Obviously you can adjust data fields, but i will say this: there just hit a lap and we’re going to stop it i’m. Actually going to discard this one. Obviously, because it’s not really something i actually want to keep and there we go we’re going to discard it all right there you go that’s how we’re going to look at a workout, so we have treadmill biking, walking cardio. You can also do some like yoga on here as well, so it does actually have workouts designed for that indoor track bike. Indoor walk indoor, swim pool swim, so it will detect what stroke you’re doing as well.
We have some golf on here as well: ski snowboard cross country skiing. What is that? Sup? I’M, not really sure it looks like a paddle board, uh strength, training, yoga, pilates, breath work, elliptical stair trainer row, so i mean you can see there’s a bunch here. You can actually add even more with the connect iq store, so there’s a lot of different activities that you can track and, in fact, if you go into some of these like yoga and pilates it’ll, even walk you through some of the actual yoga moves and same Thing with pilates now that’s, just not me, i’m sticking right up here to these top two running and treadmill, and maybe a little bit of biking and walking but that’s about all i’m going to be using this, for so just a heads up, that’s my perspective. Obviously, if you’re someone who does more strength, training or some of these other workouts i’m, not really the right person to ask about those ones just because i don’t really know much about those. But as far as the accuracy i’ve found that just like every other garmin watch, i’ve used it’s, fantastic and open roads does a great job i’ve only done three workouts on it. I haven’t done anything through super thick woods, so that’s, usually where garmin struggles let’s go ahead and take a look at the app here. So this is the run i did today. I just want to go ahead and show you what that looks like there.
I am you can see that reflection, um, so here is the workout. I can go in here. Look at a detailed map, my time, my distance, my calories burned. Maybe i can click on that there we go all right, so it’s going to take me into a detailed look at my map, so cool we’ll get out of that. Don’T really need to see that um. Here i can go into my lap. So today i did kind of like a fartlek type workout, so i can actually go in here and i can see all the various laps. I was doing like two minutes on two minutes off so there’s an on off on off two minutes on two minutes off. So i did ten of those and you can see it’s tracking each one of those and the distance and everything so that’s, really great and then over here we have our pace. Our heart rate. You can see my heart rate spiking during those two minutes on and dropping during the two minutes off did a great job. During that you can see. Cadence even have elevation, which is interesting because it doesn’t have an altimeter, so that’s. One thing that this doesn’t have that the original venue had, as it did have an altimeter. This one does not but i’m guessing it’s using gps in order to track your elevation here. That would be my best guess. We also have heart rate zones here. I didn’t actually set these up, so i don’t know if these are actually accurate for me, but you do also, of course, have the option of tracking your heart rate zones that body battery is actually pretty nice.
That was something i originally pretty much ignored on most garmin watches, but one thing it does show you is, basically: are you ready for a workout? So when i wake up in the morning, hopefully that’s at 100, because that’s when i’m gon na go run and uh, you can feel it when your body battery is down to like a 30 and you try to go for a run you’re going to notice it. So just it’s pretty accurate. I really like that. We have our stress levels: intensity, minutes, that’s, just like what we’ve been doing so far today. I think that’s actually for the week, because my goal is 350 intensity minutes for the week steps course calories very accurate sleep. So we can go in and seize our deep light, rem, sleep and awake, so hey, not bad seven hours, 49 minutes it’s, pretty good for me, pole stocks. Now this one’s kind of interesting i don’t, really know how accurate or inaccurate this is. I don’t really have much to compare it to, but you can see sleep average 93. This one’s a little bit concerning though my spo2, while i was awake, was 91. I don’t know that’s a little bit concerning, so i don’t really know how accurate or inaccurate apparently last time it did a reading. It was at 94 that feels a little bit better. I don’t feel like i’m, sick or anything so 91 percent, maybe just a little bit wearing.
We have our respiration, so i don’t really know. I don’t want to comment on that, because i don’t really know how accurate or inaccurate that is. This was just yesterday’s workout and then the last seven days, so this isn’t going to be quite accurate because i wasn’t wearing garmin watch for a couple of those days uh in the last seven. So overall, i think this is a fantastic package from garmin. Now one thing i do want to mention here is that if you are considering this watch, maybe another watch to consider because it doesn’t have the square watch face. Maybe you want that that might be something attracting you to this watch. However, i’ve kind of talked about some of the limitations of having a square watch face on a garmin watch. One watch to consider right now is the garmin vivoactive 4s. If you get a circular watch face and you don’t get some of the limitations because of this one having a square watch face, so something to consider that one does also have a trans reflective display, uh versus the uh. What you get here, the lcd display on the venue sq, so just something to consider.
