Garmin Venu 4 Watch Review
Fitness and Health With a Side of Golf
Health and fitness are one of the best gifts you can give yourself, whatever the time of year and whatever your resolution was, is or will be. The better we take care of our bodies, the better they take care of us when we go on adventures, travel, have a stressful day or play 18 holes.
The Garmin Venu 4 Watch is Garmin’s health-focused smartwatch, and it can do pretty much everything. It also connects to the Garmin Golf app, so you can wear it every day for your health and fitness, and whenever you get to play, it’s ready to give you distances and keep score.
Health tracking
Health is the heart of the Venu 4. Everything from the main display to the first menus is built around activities and health. A swipe up gives you a health snapshot, and you can open each part for more detail: Body Battery, sleep score, sleep coach, heart rate, HRV, steps, Pulse Ox and stress.
Used with the Garmin Connect app, those details let you take real control of your health, make a plan and follow it.
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Display and style
The Venu 4 has a bright, clear AMOLED display, and the touchscreen is easy to swipe and navigate. You can customize the home screen with features, or completely through the Garmin Connect IQ store. Two buttons work with the touchscreen to get you to almost any menu on the watch.
The metal bezel comes in black or silver, and there are sporty and dressier band options. The stock bands are really comfortable and fit almost any wrist.
Golf features
The Venu 4 is one of the Garmin watches that connect to the Garmin Golf app and work as a GPS on the course. Once your courses are downloaded you don’t need your phone; everything happens on the watch.
You get distances to the front, middle and back of the green plus hazards and bunkers, but only limited maps of the hole. You can keep score and track stats, and holes usually auto-advance as you play. If you miss a score, tap the top button to get to the scorecard.
Of the Garmin watches with golf, this has the most basic golf features. It gives you yardages and green views, not the full-color hole maps of the Garmin Approach golf watches or even the Venu X1. It works well for golf, but as a side feature rather than the main event.
Fitness features
The Venu 4 is a premium fitness watch, and I couldn’t find an activity it couldn’t track. I went hiking in Mexico, kayaking on the ocean, biking around my neighborhood, playing basketball at the gym and doing yoga in class. Every activity tracks GPS, heart rate, elevation, stress, respiration and more.
The solid build, water resistance and tracking let me wear it all the time, whatever I was doing.
Everyday smartwatch features
The Venu 4 works in daily life with or without fitness, health or golf. It has all the smartwatch features: messages, music, payments, phone calls, weather and more. If you can think of a smartwatch feature, it probably has it. I love the bright LED flashlight; I never realized how much I was missing one.
Garmin rates the battery at up to 12 days between charges, depending on how much you use the features and play golf, and recharging took me less than an hour.
Should you buy it?
Garmin makes a wide range of watches, each with a different person in mind. The Venu 4 suits an active man or woman who wants a health and fitness smartwatch that keeps up with a busy lifestyle and helps them reach their goals. It works well on the golf course too, as a side feature.
If golf is the main reason you want a watch, a Garmin Approach gives you full hole maps. If you want one watch for health, fitness and the odd round, I’ve worn the Venu 4 every day since it arrived, and it has a good chance of staying on my wrist.
For more information: Garmin website
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