Two Months with the Garmin Venu 3: Love it, Hate It

Intro

I switched from the Galaxy Watch 4 to the Garmin Venu 3 more than two months ago. Now, I’m fully settled and do not look back. In this post, I list my personal hate and love features of my Garmin Venu 3.

Let’s start with the “hate” list and keep the positive for the end.

What I do Hate Disappoints Me About my Garmin Venu 3

Watchfaces Handling: It is an absolute disaster. I can barely imagine how this can be done worse, even intentionally.

Stock Watch Faces: Most of them are ugly (I know this is subjective, but they are really ugly). Also none of them have full AOD. All the cool Garmin watch faces I have seen are exclusive for more expensive models (by the way, the Venu 3 is not cheap at all).

Notifications: Notifications without proper icons of the application are grouped together. It’s like traveling back in time by 10 years or so (see screen shot and details in “Garmin Venu 3 versus Galaxy Watch – Smart Features Comparison Part 2“).

Phone Connection and Movement Notifications: Notifications about lost connection with a phone and time to move are just a little bit above the usable level. Check more details in the “” article “Garmin Venu 3 versus Galaxy Watch – Smart Features Comparison“.

Timer App: I use 2-4 timers regularly. Without presets and “recently used” values, it is surprisingly annoying to set a value again every time.

Missing a Voice Recorder App: This is a must-have app for a watch with a microphone.

No Integration with 3rd Party Scales: Ok, forget real integration, but there is no way to add body fat manually if you did not purchase Garmin scales, which are super expensive.

Garmin Charging Connector: I have nothing against wired charging, but the charging connector the Venu 3 has is really uncomfortable to use. I believe that the wired charging Pixel Watch 2 offers a much better user experience.

No Hope for Noticeable New Features: Garmin limits features based on business/marketing strategy, not based on hardware capabilities. This is sad.

What I Love About the Garmin Venu 3

Watch Faces: Yes, watches are in both lists. Some watch faces are super flexible and manage to combine good readability with tons of extra information.

Body Battery: A simply like it.

HRV, HRV Status, Stress Measurement During the Night: These features provide great insights.

Battery Life: For me this quantity has become a huge usage experience changing quality.

Morning Report: A very useful feature. Interestingly, my Tizen-based Galaxy Watch 3 had the morning report as well (different information, way less configurable). After Samsung removed it in their first WearOS-based watch, I hoped Samsung would bring this report back in one of the next updates—there is nothing super complex here for a powerful system like WearOS. Since then, I have received two major WearOS updates and about ten intermediate updates. Still, there is no sign of a morning report.

Proactive Stress Monitoring: It informs me if my stress goes really high, so I can act.

Badges & Expeditions: There are so many of them, and they are unique and rare as well! Expeditions are cool. Actually, this is what I tried to emulate myself some time ago. I described this in “How Many Times I Walked Though the Europe with my Samsung Watches (So Far)?” article.

Sleep Mode: The sleep mode watch face is not too bright but still very readable. When I wake up a few minutes before my alarm, I can turn it off for the day with one tap—such details make for great usability.

Web Garmin Connect Application: It is very handy to have the possibility to do everything not just in the mobile app but also using a laptop. Graphs, stats, creating workout plans—big screen, mouse operation, multiple windows if needed, and so on.

Workout Trimming: When I forget to stop my workout (happens to me when I hike or walk from time to time), I can trim the recorded activity later and remove my “driving home” part of the adventure from my hike.

Health Snapshot: The Health Snapshot measures all health metrics (including SpO2, which is usually disabled on my watch) and builds a report. I have not used the result so far, but I like the idea and am mostly sure that one day it will help me.

Conclusion

Garmin Venu 3 is far from perfect. Most of the issues annoying me are purely software and can be fixed without huge efforts (at least I think so). However, I’m not very optimistic about this.

On the other hand Venu 3 has so many cool features that I do not regret purchasing even for a minute.