Garmin Venu 4 Review

Design and screen

• Stainless steel
• Built-in LED flashlight
• 1.2- or 1.4-inch display

Garmin’s Venu series has had something of a glow-up for its latest model. It’s gone from being a relatively cheap and plasticcy device into being one made from stainless steel. It’s the first thing you notice when you go from the previous Venu 3 to the Venu 4.

It’s also lost the third button (the middle one) on the right side, and has redesigned top and bottom buttons to make it feel that bit more sophisticated than the previous efforts. That feel is only helped along by the brown leather strap which comes with the most expensive version in the range.

In my mind, it’s a much needed improvement, with the previous versions always seemingly quite featureless and bland in the aesthetics department. It adds a splash of that premium feel typically reserved for the much more expensive Fenix models, but without changing the look to be as overtly outdoorsy.

The end result is a watch that looks and feels more like a watch, and less like a glorified fitness tracker with a round body. Whether or not that change is worth the pretty high price point, that’s up for debate, but it at least makes the watch better looking and more structurally solid.

One curious addition, following the example of Garmin’s other watch ranges over the past 12 months or so, is the LED flashlight built into the top edge. If you need to get dressed in the dark, or find something in a blackout, when there’s a power cut, having that instantly available torch on your wrist can be super handy.

You can also set it to flash red, using it to draw attention to yourself if you get lost/stuck when out in poor visibility.

The only downside of the Venu’s design is similar to previous models: it doesn’t feature the five button control system used by many of Garmin’s other more sports-focused models. So for a lot of interactions you do need to use the touchscreen, and that’s not always convenient or intuitive. Especially if you’re mid-exercise.

As is pretty typical for any Garmin, you get solid waterproofing though. With 5ATM water resistance and swim-proof ratings, you’ll be able to take this watch to track most water-based sports. It’s not a diving watch, but for open water swimming or pool swimming, you should be fine.

Front and centre is a superbly bright and vibrant 1.4-inch AMOLED display (or 1.2-inches if you have the smaller model). Details are nice and crisp, and animations are smoother than older Garmin models, giving you more of that feeling that this is, indeed, a smartwatch.

Outdoors in bright daylight, the glass on the front can be quite reflective, but the screen is bright enough that it’s easy enough to read and see the time or your workout stats as you’re on the move.

And, if you want to, you can enable the Red Shift feature that’s become popular in recent years. You can switch it on manually, or schedule it for certain times like night time. It turns the entire interface a red/orange colour to reduce glare, but make it easily visible in the dark.

Just like the Venu 3, it has a loudspeaker playing loud chimes and alerts when you start and stop activities, or hit the 1km lap marks on runs and walks. It gives the Venu a bit more of a playful feel, and also means you can answer phone calls from your wrist and the audio will come through that speaker.

Sadly, despite being a fairly pricey watch, there’s no sapphire crystal glass over the display. It’s Gorilla Glass 3, which isn’t close to being even Corning’s most durable or scratch resistant coating.

If you’re someone who regularly does scrambling, rock climbing, bouldering or anything where you know your watch will regularly collide with hard objects, you might want to consider a different watch.

Software and features

• Updated software and UI
• Works well with iOS and Android
• Some polish still needed

It seemed inevitable when I reviewed the Vivoactive 6 earlier in the year that the Venu would be updated to the newer software system used by the latest Vivoactive. And that’s exactly what’s happened with the Venu 4.

Swiping down from the watch face gets you to your notifications, a bit like a smartphone. That means if you want to get to your Glances (or the data widgets that appear in a list) you need to swipe upwards.

And those Glances are much richer, graphically, than the previous Venu, with coloured gradient backgrounds and a smoother animation as you scroll through them. It gives the watch software a more coherent hierarchy, which the older version of Garmin software was missing. Although, it does take a little time to get used to.

It’s loaded with all the usual features you’d expect from a Garmin smartwatch. Garmin Pay exists for contactless payments, at least for those banks and services that support it.

You can also download offline playlists from popular music services like Amazon Music, Spotify and Deezer. If you want to leave your phone at home, you can, and still listen to music with a pair of earbuds while out on your run, and pick up milk from the shop on the way home too.

It still lacks a little in terms of third-party app support, so you don’t quite get that same feeling of smartness as if you were to buy an Apple Watch or a Pixel/Samsung Galaxy Watch. But you do get something none of them offer: cross platform support. It doesn’t matter if you use an Android phone or an iPhone, you can use a Garmin.

Still it’s lacking in a couple of areas when compared to some of the other fully-featured smartwatches.

It doesn’t always feel like the interface is well suited or easily controlled with the touchscreen, especially since sometimes the touchscreen responsiveness can be a little lacking. Getting into some settings and menus is more cumbersome, because it doesn’t have the five button control system adopted by the likes of the Fenix, Epix and Forerunner models.

And then there’s the built in voice assistant, which can be handy for doing things like setting timers, but it’s not as fully featured as Siri or Google’s Gemini or Google Assistant. Still, at least you can activate your phone’s assistant instead and use the microphone and speaker to pass through control to the phone instead.

Fitness and Health Tracking

• Multi-band GPS support with great performance
• Excellent tracking capabilities
• Companion app needs a better way to display data

Garmin’s reputation has been built on tracking location and routes reliably. And so it’s no surprise to see the boat pushed out when it comes to GPS tracking capability here.

The Venu 4 features multi-band support for route-tracking along with support for several systems. It means, as far as tracking distances, route accuracy and how quickly it logs on to your location at the beginning of the session, it’s up there with the best.

It locks on to GPS within a few seconds of starting a walking or running activity, with distances measured consistently in line with what I’d expect them to be on my regular routes. I saw fewer inconsistencies than I did with either the Huawei Watch GT 6 Pro or the Apple Watch Series 11 that I tested alongside it for most of my activities.

Even under tree covering, it kept a solid connection and traced the route along the road.

I had a similar feeling with heart-rate measuring. We’re past the point where intense activities seem to throw off the HR sensor, and so even during activities with lots of arm movement and abrupt jumps in intensity, the tracking stays solid.

During kettlebell sessions the heart-rate data on the watch screen consistently responded quickly to changes, most noticeable between warm up and the first set of reps. It didn’t take an age to catch up, and kept the signal clean and clear through the whole workout.

Of course, any accurate tracking requires a snug fit and a clean signal, but Garmin’s Elevate 5 sensor on the underside of the Venu 4 is among the strongest on the market. I’ve experienced it on several models now, and have generally found it to be really reliable and only a beat or two per minute behind a chest strap.

All of this is important when it comes to Garmin’s health app, called Garmin Connect, which looks after importing, understanding and then presenting the data in a way that’s helpful. For metrics like Body Battery, Training Readiness and Training Condition, being able to accurately detect your effort levels can make a huge difference.

With consistent, reliable readings it can better inform you whether or not today’s a good day to train, or how much energy you have left in the tank, or even if your training is helping you get fitter, or if you’re overtraining. All of it ties together into a system that can give you a lot of insight.

It’s also important for the sleep coaching feature which guides you on how much rest you might need depending on the intensity of physical strain throughout the day.

Garmin’s only issue here is that the Connect app isn’t the most newbie-friendly approach to data presentation. It’s easy to get bogged down in data, and get lost in a multitude of sub menus and categories to find the exact data you’re looking for.

Credit where it’s due, the situation is much better than it used to be, allowing you to choose which data gets pride of place on the Home Screen and seeing what you want to see on the first page. Still, I feel apps like Oura’s and Fitbit are far more user friendly.

If you’re a sports data enthusiast who wants all those metrics, Garmin’s approach definitely suits more. But by the same token, it feels like the Venu series isn’t really designed for you. So while the Venu series has long been the more lifestyle, average consumer type device, Garmin’s app can seem a bit too data-driven to match those ambitions.

Sleep tracking was generally okay, but as I’ve found with a few Garmin watches now, not as reliable as the sleep tracking on an Apple Watch or the Oura Ring 4. Especially when it comes to detecting periods of restlessness, or awake times. There were several nights when sleep stages showed very little time awake, even when I’d had struggles getting down to sleep or knowing that I woke up several times in the night.

Otherwise, the times shown between getting down to sleep and getting up were pretty consistent. It’s just a shame the stages weren’t accurate, because it feels like those are necessary to also feed into the training readiness and body battery features.

And you do get a lot of very useful insight into every fitness and health. Things like your fitness age, respiration rates and all-day stress are all there. As are features like meditation, breath work and nap detection. You also get women’s health features for cycle tracking. It’s a very thorough all-round system.

There is, of course, the optional premium Garmin subscription which gives you a bit more insight if you want to pay for AI to analyse your data and explain it to you in a way that makes sense. But, I’ve personally not found the need to pay for that to get the information I need from Garmin. And given the price of the company’s watches, that’s something I feel should be included as standard.

Battery life

• Up to 12 days on a charge
• Four days with always-on display active

As is typical for Garmin watches, the stripped back smart feature list compared to the likes of Apple Watch and Wear OS smartwatches means you get very strong battery life.

Even though it’s got a bright, fluid display, the battery can get up to 12 days of use on a full charge. That’s with just using it as a regular smartwatch, with notifications popping up from your smartphone whenever those land.

Of course, the more you use it for workout or activity tracking (particularly those with GPS) the more it drains. And if you have the always-on display enabled the battery will only last about four days. Those promises from Garmin are just about accurate too. And exact battery life varies based on your lifestyle and usage.

On weeks where I did 3-4 activities, with at least two of those being hour-long walks, using multi-band all-system location tracking, I’d estimate somewhere around the 10-11 day mark was possible. Still, regardless of how you use it, the battery will comfortably outlast even the most long-lasting Apple Watch, and that’s even if you have the always-on screen enabled showing the time constantly.

Should you buy it?