Garmin 010-02427-00 Venu Sq, GPS Smartwatch with Bright Touchscreen Display, Up to 6 Days of Battery Life, Slate Aluminum Bezel with Shadow Gray Case and Slate Silicone Band

Because Amazon sometimes confuses products in their reviews, this is for the Garmin Venu SQ watch.After several years of accidents, surgeries, and the lethargy that comes with a shutdown, I recognized an urgent need to change behavior. This watch was the trigger to that change and I'm very impressed.Firstly, I don't like watches. It's been 30 years since I wore a wristwatch and I'm not quick to change. However, this watch is light and thin and nearly unnoticeable. I did replace the band with a nice wrap-around velcro model that is much more comfortable than a clasp-type band. That improved my opinion, too.This watch tells me about my heart rate, my respiration rate, my stress levels, some very interesting information about my sleep, and it even tells time.I feel informed about my heart health and my daily routine in a way I could not imagine before.I also feel certain that many of the spandex and ripped-t-shirt crowd at my gym would find it inadequate for their iron-pumping and celery-smoothie lifestyles. For them, a $600 watch might be an appropriate purchase. For me, a nice entry-level watch that tracks so many things I didn't know a watch could track is more than sufficient.I have much to learn from my watch.The software installed on my iPhone easily and helped me set up the watch quickly.The one "problem" with the watch was that the native language was not set up as my language, and I'm no polyphone. I found some good instructions on the interwebs that told me to press "this," then scroll down this many places and select the option found there. Then go two steps to here. It was like a school locker combination: 5 steps down, two steps right, two steps down... I didn't understand any of the words on the screen until I got to the label that said "English." Once pressed, my watch and I communicated much better.

I had it for a couple weeks. Use to track steps, cardio, walks, jogs, gym mostly, but it does so much more. However, after turning off push notifications for certain things I still get them. When you hit a goal like steps, it will alert for each step after not allowing access to anything else unless you stop walking because it gets locked up alerting, but then wait for alerts to stop, then proceed to next function. It's really annoying. I still get voice-mail alerts and phone stuff after turning phone notifications off. Still get others too for social media. Also, it won't track any rep counts for lower body when using strength mode. And when it tracks upper body movements like bench, curls, presses, etc. It won't count all the reps, maybe 7 out of 10, or less sometimes. I like how it tracks my cardio stuff, intensity minutes, heart rate, calories, sleep, etc. Overall, I love it, but it needs some work on the mentioned issues. And I wish it had access to the gym and fitness activity listed in app, but this model doesn't have that feature unfortunately.UPDATE: The issue with the alerts getting stuck was from Samsung health pushing notifications. I turned it off and the issues stopped. I also noticed that the strength training aspect not only doesn't count lower body reps, but when it counts upper body stuff it'll confuse bench with military press, or curls, etc.. So not only does it not count every rep, it counts bench reps and military press or whatever and to change you need to go in and edit each set. I'm not doing it, but that's how you could fix. You can also add the not counted reps and change it to reflect what you're doing, but who wants to do all that! Also hit my intensity minutes and got 500 twice in one day but still never got my Badge! Still love the watch tho.

This is my first smartwatch. I came in with my eyes open after watching reviews and sifting through competitor's products, comparing and contrasting. I even made an excel spreadsheet of features, including the price as a barometer of what should be included. What can be hard to quantify is quality, beauty, and usability unless you've actually got your mitts on the product.I am blown away. I thought for $169 I was going to get some half-baked fitbit clone, but this is not. This has an entire online ecosystem that you can use to leverage it's features. Yes, it has sleep tracking (which is not it's best feature), stress monitoring (which is nothing to write home about), body battery (which is quite good), heart rate monitoring (also quite good), and activity monitoring (which I think is its super-power). I think if you are not planning on using its activity tracking while doing some physical activity, this watch is not for you. There are other products out there like an android watch or something.If you are looking for a relatively inexpensive health-tracking device that helps you maintain your exercise and weight, you have come to the right place. The Garmin ecosystem uses a mobile app called Garmin Connect which is indispensable to logging advancements and gains in your fitness regime. They also have an online version which is quite good that uses a customizable dashboard that you can setup to look over your statistics.What I use everyday is the activity tracker which tells me my average heart rate, how many calories I burned, and if running how far I went. It keeps track of your records and congratulates you when you beat them.A game-changer for me was when I started tracking my calories and hydration. The watch doesn't support inputting calories, but it has a "widget" you can download for hydration (which is not so good imo). What you can do is connect the Garmin Connect mobile app with a MyFitnessPal account, and easily track your calorie intake. I go into the mobile app and record my meals and water intake which helps me to balance my daily calories and hydration. I bought this watch recently and this has resulted in over 10 lbs weight loss.There is tons of integration with your smartphone, notifications like SMS, emails, and anything else that plops on your phone screen gets ported over. The watch uses the phone to pull in data like weather and any settings you may have changed using the Garmin Connect app. One other thing to note is the Garmin IQ store. You can download apps, widgets, and watch faces, which make the watch much more cool than the default ones.So, all in all there is a lot to offer and I am a proud owner of the Garmin Venu SQ.