The Garmin Venu 2 is one of the best sports watches, combining serious fitness features with great smartwatch tools for everyday use. Its design is not groundbreaking and closely resembles the original Garmin Venu, but it is a difficult balance to strike between being suitable for both workouts and general wear. The high-resolution, bright AMOLED display is the real star, allowing you to view large amounts of data at once and put a wealth of information about your training progress and overall health right on your wrist. With its thoughtful design and great features, the Venu 2 is one of the best Garmin watches ever.
Like many wearables these days, Venu 2 is focused on wellness, with all-day stress monitoring and Body Battery energy scores during a run to remind you to take care of your mental health. It also tracks water intake, daily steps taken, stairs climbed, calories burned, and monitors sleep patterns.
But this is more than just a fitness tracker; Venu 2 has serious tools for monitoring a variety of sports. Runners are especially well taken care of. As one would expect from Garmin, a company renowned for accurate satellite navigation, the onboard GPS is extremely accurate, providing readings with only a small margin of error and building highly detailed maps showing changes in pace during training sessions.
The watch also does not feature a speaker and microphone. It is unfortunate, however, that it does not offer hands-free voice control or the ability to make quick phone calls from your wrist. This feature has been available for several years on other products in the same price range. Also, the Garmin Connect IQ app is a separate optional app that must be downloaded to the phone for more apps and watch faces, and it does not have as many third-party apps as many competitors’ products.
In our real-world testing, we were able to use the Venu 2S for five days before recharging it. This included 30 minutes of daily GPS workouts, notifications, and nightly sleep and SpO2 tracking. We were unable to test the larger Venu 2, but we assume the battery will last even longer. If we are able to perform a battery test on this watch, we will update this review. With the always-on display turned on, we expect battery life to be reduced to 2 to 2.5 days.