Garmin Venu 3 smartwatch review: The best Venu yet

Smartwatches are becoming increasingly more advanced everyday companions. They help monitor our sleep, stress, and activity levels while keeping notifications less than an arm’s length away. It’s understandable to gravitate towards the smartwatch made by your preferred phone brand, like the Apple, Pixel, or Galaxy watches.

However, plenty of viable, sometimes more capable, third-party watches are worth consideration. In fact, one such watch from Garmin — the Venu 3, released in August 2023 — demands it.

Price, availability, and specs

The Garmin Venu 3 costs $450 and is available through various outlets, including REI, Scheels, Amazon, Best Buy, and Garmin. Price and availability may vary by case size and model color. Select varieties are currently on sale for $400.

What’s good about the Garmin Venu 3?

Loaded with all the most smartwatch features, the Venu 3 is both a significant leap from prior Garmin generations and a worthy investment for first-time Garmin owners. The company made some significant updates and upgrades to its Venu line with this third generation in hardware, features, and user experience.

The Garmin Venu 3’s crown jewel is its battery life, but before we get there, let’s talk about a different type of battery this smartwatch offers — Body Battery. I appreciate this brand’s approach to presenting easily digestible health and wellness data. While you can and probably should look at deeper sleep trends through the Garmin app, like time spent in REM and waking moments, each morning, Garmin presents this as an overall sleep score and rates the score as fair, poor, excellent, etc.

Like the sleep score, Body Battery is another surface-level daily score Garmin assigns based on your sleep quality and stress levels, offering an at-a-glance representation of your daily energy. Hard and fast numbers are important, but they are not conducive to everyone’s preferences for monitoring their wellness. Garmin’s latest installment in the Venu series includes a sensor for constant ECG monitoring, too, if that’s a necessary component of your personal health.

Overall, I’ve grown to prefer Garmin’s approach to activity and fitness over Apple’s. Garmin’s movement goals (for calories, steps, etc.) are fluid by default, changing daily based on your recent activity levels. This neutralized, meet-you-where-you-’re-at strategy worked better for me over the rigid, unmoving daily goals and UI that put the rings begging to be closed at the center of everything. (If that’s more your speed, you can switch your Garmin watch to manual instead of automatic goals.)

The Garmin Venu 3’s 1.4-inch face is only marginally larger than its predecessor, but I quickly noticed a brighter, clearer display on the Venu 3. The Venu 3S is smaller if you’re shopping for a great women’s smartwatch. This is especially important since the Venu 3, unlike the 2, includes images in its notifications where applicable, such as a picture text message or a preview of a social media post.

While the larger face, achieved by slightly narrowing the bezel of the Venu 2, puts the Garmin Venu 3 slightly ahead of competitors (1.3 inches on the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 and Pixel Watch 2), these three models are about on par with one another in pixel density. Actually, the Venu 3 lags ever-so-slightly behind in that regard, with its PPI of about 319, and the other two have a PPI above 320. For the average user, though, this is likely an imperceptible difference.

The onboard speaker is a notable upgrade to the Venu 3 line. I had no problem taking phone calls on the Venu 3 as long as my smartphone was within range. Speaker and mic quality are best described as meeting expectations; if I kept the watch within a foot or so of my face, the person on the other end could hear me fine.

Garmin also added a third button to the Venu 3’s outer edge, which opens a convenient recent menu to access the apps you use the most. It would be nice if this included recent activities, too. Battery life largely depends on the use case.

Some smartwatch batteries only last a couple of days. Garmin says “smartwatch mode” should have two weeks of battery. But I found that generally mixed-use clocks in at about a week of battery, max about 10 days, which is still leaps and bounds ahead of competing watches. (Mixed use means, to me, nightly sleep tracking, which engages pulse ox tracking, music play for one to two-hour workouts, and regular spurts of exercise tracking and GPS use for outdoor walking. I don’t regularly use all-day pulse ox tracking, the always-on display, round-the-clock satellite positioning, or music playback for hours upon end.)

The power-saving option pushes battery life out to a little over three weeks. Even with different features shortening its life by a large margin, the Venu 3’s battery outpaces many of its competitors, even its own predecessor. The Google Pixel Watch 2, for example, only offers about 24 hours of battery life while in always-on mode, while the Venu 3 will make it through at least three or four provided GPS and music playback services are minimally used.

What’s bad about the Garmin Venu 3?

For a while, many have considered GarminOS to be behind the times, especially compared to the highly refined Apple WatchOS or Google’s widely adopted WearOS. While I maintain that Garmin is making a nice pace in polishing and modernizing its user interface (the new horizontal swipe to access a programmable shortcut like Spotify or starting a run, for example), there are still a few scattered opportunities for improvement.

The Venu 3 lacks a digital crown, which may disappoint some users who prefer the side wheel for navigation. (Apple’s smartwatches are a good choice for anyone who prefers crown-based controls.) I scarcely noticed its absence, even as a longtime Apple user, and found using the touch screen for primary navigation easy to get used to.

I dream of days when switching smartwatch brands — or even from one model to another within the same brand — doesn’t mean adopting another proprietary charger. The Venu 3 uses the same charger as the Venu 2 but differs from other Garmin-branded watches.

Should you buy it?

As one of today’s more expensive general-use smartwatches, Garmin was under a lot of pressure to perform and perform exceptionally well compared to competing watches, especially competing watches from native smartphone brands.

Fortunately, Garmin is up to its own challenge. And while using a third-party smartwatch isn’t as effortless as using an Apple Watch with an iPhone or a Pixel Watch with a Pixel, Garmin makes up for it with a user-friendly companion app, reliable sleep and fitness tracking, quality hardware, and a commitment to improving its overall user experience with each new generation.

Its stellar battery life, easy access to activities like walking and hiking, and crisp onboard speaker for calls or personal music enjoyment impressed me. Since the Venu 3 supports many native and third-party ancillary fitness and activity apps, it’s a strong smartwatch choice for golfers, weightlifters, cyclists, and swimmers — casual and serious athletes alike.

There are more affordable, simpler, hybrid-style smartwatches out there for folks who don’t need more health tracking beyond a simple pedometer. But the Garmin Venu 3 receives my enthusiastic endorsement for most average users who work out in some way at least a couple of times per week and for people who want to explore a consumer-level approach to sleep tracking — it’s a great tool for getting more insight into your health.