Garmin never liked staying on their laurels for too long, and has done it again: after announcing its new running watch, the Garmin Forerunner 745, and the new Garmin HRM-Pro heart rate monitor, it has also surprised us all revealing the Garmin Venu SQ, an updated, boxy version of the original Garmin Venu, announced about a year ago.
In case you weren't clear before, it's now more than obvious that Garmin is trying to dominate both the casual and hardcore wearable fitness device market, releasing consecutive new smartwatches to compete with the Apple Watch SE, the Fitbit Sense / Fitbit Versa 3 and so on.
Essential features of the new Garmin Venu SQ
Probably the best feature of the Garmin Venu SQ is its price: the standard edition is almost € 100 cheaper than the new Apple Watch SE. It's also € 20 cheaper than the Fitbit Versa 3. But is the Garmin Venu SQ really "cheap"?
From what we can tell, the list of features looks promising enough. The Garmin Venu SQ series features a 1.3-inch rectangular Corning Gorilla Glass touchscreen with a lightweight aluminum bezel and a 'comfortable' silicone band. The original Venu has a smaller screen (1.2 ", circular), but has a resolution of 390 x 390 pixels.
On the other hand, the Venu SQ has a resolution of 240 x 240 pixels , which is significantly less dense than the rounded version. In comparison, the smaller version of the Apple Watch SE has a screen size of 1.57 "and a resolution of 368 x 448 pixels.
The Garmin Venu SQ also delves more on wellness with features including advanced tracking sleep with Pulse Ox, monitor breathing, heart rate alerts abnormal (high and low), tracking the menstrual cycle track stress with reminders relaxation, hydration tracking and much more. The watch also uses Garmin's latest optical heart rate sensor, the Elevate V3, which measures heart rate several times per second, 24 hours a day.
Battery life is pretty good too – the Garmin Venu SQ can run for up to 6 days in smartwatch mode and up to 14 hours in GPS mode. Compare this to the 18 hour 'all day' battery life of the Apple Watch SE.
In addition to all that, the Garmin Venu SQ also supports smart notification, incident detection (the watch sends the real-time location to emergency contacts when you fall), Garmin Pay, and you can also customize the watch with billions of dials. and apps through the Garmin Connect IQ store. Garmin Venu SQ Music Edition comes with built-in storage for music.
Price and release date
You will find the classic version for € 199.99 and the Music Edition version for € 249.99 .
