GarminVenu 2 GPS 43mm Smartwatch, AMOLED Touchscreen, All-day Advanced Health & Fitness Features, Music Storage, Wellness Smartwatch with up to 11 days battery life, Black

Ok I've owned a lot of smart watches: Apple Watch 44mm Nike Cellular, Huawei Watch 2, Fitbit Versa, Fitbit Versa 2, FitBit Sense, Galaxy Watch 2 42mm, Fossil Sport, Fossil Gen 5. Overall the best out of all of these was the Apple Watch for sure but it came with some drawbacks like battery life.Starting with my use case: I want a good fitness tracker, good battery life, a nice screen and notifications on my wrist. I don't care about apps on my watch as long as it vibrates when I get a message or call I'm happy.The Garmin Venu 2 is perfect. I've owned it for over a week and I've only just had to charge it. Honestly I don't know how it's able to do everything it does and have that amount of battery life. 10 days with normal use is insane!!It's been great at counting steps and mapping my walks so far (need to increase the exercise routines). I love that I can save the animated workouts to my watch as well.It's comfortable, light weight and does everything I need it to do.Biggest question: do I rate it higher than the Apple watch? Yes with a but. I don't think I ever took full advantage of the Apple watch. It was great but I just don't care about apps at all. The only thing the Apple watch had over this is a more distinct vibration on my wrist.If this was to break I would buy another one because it's so amazing. Garmin have really shocked me with this watch!!Just buy one it's brilliant.

Fantastic watch and great variety of features for the cost. The watch itself tracks every stat you could want and is so easy to use.I love my Venu 2 and would really struggle to change from Garmin moving forward.

I've previously had the Garmin 225 and then 235, and this feels like a natural evolution and step up from those.I toyed with getting the 245, but the Venu 2 won out for me with the slightly more refined design. It looks classy on the wrist and bridges the gap between smart-watch and activity tracker really well in my opinion.Battery life on Garmins is always excellent, and this is no exception. Running or biking 3/4 times a week, I'm only ha ing to charge once a week, and feel like this could last forever.Very good UI - the range of activities is impressive, and feel I could benefit even more from getting cadence sensors for my spin bike (the watch encourages you to do this which is a nice touch).I've only used the on board music feature a couple of times, but think I'll start to do this more so I can ditch the phone.Only slight downside is a struggle getting Garmin pay working with my starling card - it's not the end of the world and I'm unlikely to ever need it, but it is worth knowing that the software for that element is slightly glitchy.Still, an excellent smart-watch/activity tracker hybrid, and fully deserving of its 5 stars here.

I've been a longstanding Garmin customer for a few years and have had fenix 6s as well as this watch so I think I'm in a position to make an honest from comparable comparison. I guess the pros to the venuel is the fact that it's extremely light and you don't even notice it on your wrist compared to the phoenix that was like a tank and weighed nearly 100 g and always felt very heavy. The venu has very good battery life typically from normal use as well as basic navigation back to a hotel so you typically get between 3 to 4 days unlike some whates such as the Samsung watch 4 for which I had literally would give me 48 hours at a very maximum so top marks the Garmin for the battery life. To watch itself is pretty good it's not as probably as feature full as a Samsung watch but it does give you your health age as well as runs a bunch of diagnostics to test HRV blood pressure fitness levels etc etc and does a pretty good job of this. The Garmin connect app is excellent and works seamlessly with the watch and is not always requesting to pair with the watch and you can set it in such a way that you just open the app periodically to download the data which is far better for the watches battery life.I use the watch for fishing quite a bit and it's fully waterproof I've been out to Madeira fishing recently and it's water to proof and salt proof and I've had no issues with that although I don't use it for diving. I found it hard to get a screen protector to protect the watch as it has a slight curvature on the screen so you can only really use the plastic silicone covers which are not hard glass or in any way as effective as a proper screen protecter say for the fenix 6r.I guess the cons to this watch the main reason is the fact that it does not have maps and does not have built in decent navigation where you can actually go for a hike and add a GPX route to the watch in order to get a basic trail. It does allow some form of navigation where you can store navigation point say your base or your home and it will give you an arrow pointer towards that set location but it will not allow you to import a trail that someone else's walked and follow that trail but I guess that is why it costs significantly less than the fenix 6 and it is as I say a fitness watch and not really a navigation hiking watch.Overall I'm pretty pleased to watch I've had a bunch of smart watches and I must say this is the best for the money and it feels really good on the wrist and not very heavy and has most of the features that I would like I think if I had to criticize it as I say it will be having navigation with maps would make it an awesome contender for best smartwatchThanks