There’s no doubt about it — I’ve been blown away by the Garmin Venu 4. It’s a stunning-looking smart watch, with all of the premium health and fitness features of some of the best Garmin watches on the market. I’ve swapped my brand new Apple Watch 11 for the Garmin Venu 4 this past week, and read on to find out why I’m not sure I’ll be going back.
If you’re new to the Garmin Venu line, it’s Garmin’s most popular smartwatch. The Venu 4 has had a design upgrade compared with the Garmin Venu 3 — it has lost a button on the side, moving to a touchscreen design, has a brighter screen, and features an all-metal bezel. If you’re trying to decide between the Garmin Venu 4 and the latest Apple Watch 11, here are all the specs compared.
Liked: The Venu 4’s advanced health tracking
The Venu 4 is pretty much the same as the Garmin Forerunner 570 behind the screen. It features all of Garmin’s newest health tracking capabilities, plus one brand-new feature: lifestyle logging. Lifestyle logging will be rolled out to all of Garmin’s newest watches, and it’s effectively the same as Whoop’s logging system, allowing you to log behaviors like caffeine intake or alcohol intake to see how they impact your sleep and recovery.
In fact, the Garmin Venu 4 has one key upgrade compared to the Garmin Forerunner 570, and that’s the ability to take ECG readings from your wrist. The Forerunner 570 does have additional buttons, which makes using it on the run that little bit easier, but it’s a tough decision to make when choosing between the two.
Compared to Apple, I really appreciate Garmin’s recovery recommendations and tools like Body Battery, which allow me to see how the stress of the day is draining me. Garmin’s morning and evening reports are also far more useful than Apple’s, which says
I swapped my Apple Watch 11 for the Garmin Venu 4 – here’s 3 things I liked and 2 things I missed
