14 DAY TRIAL // Garmin has long been my preferred brand for activity trackers, so when the company announced its latest-generation models, which among others also included an OLED smartwatch, I thought I’d finally be able to give up on my Apple Watch once and for all.
Garmin Venu is a gorgeous piece of technology which bundles the activity tracking features already pioneered by Garmin in a substantially-polished look, all hiding under an OLED screen that makes everything on the display look impressive.
While OLED screens have been around for a long time, Venu is only the first Garmin model featuring such display technology, with many more likely to follow in the next generations.
At first glance, the Venu appears to be a very advanced piece of technology. A 1.2-inch AMOLED screen, Gorilla Glass 3 for extra durability, a stainless steel bezel, a fiber-reinforced polymer with polymer rear cover on the case, and a plethora of activity tracking features, all are available in this $349.99 smartwatch that’s supposed to mix the best of activity trackers and smartwatches.
And truth be told, the Venu really is a device that’s worth all the praises... when it works.
At $350, the Garmin Venu costs nearly as much as the Apple Watch Series 5, so you’d expect a performance that leaves no room for mistakes. Unfortunately, this isn’t by any means what I’m getting on the Venu.
First of all, it’s the notification nightmare.
Just like any smartwatch, the Venu shows the incoming notifications on the display, and depending on the mobile platform that it’s paired with, provides you with various options to interact with them.
The struggle starts when you receive more than one notification. For example, if someone sends you five different messages, which means the Venu should display five different notifications as well, only the first of them shows up on the screen, along with a short vibration whose intensity you can configure from the settings screen. Depending on the timeout settings, the notification stays on the screen anywhere from 30 seconds to more than a minute, without allowing any other content to be displayed.
So technically, despite receiving 5 different notifications you see only one for 30 seconds, and the Venu obviously vibrates just once. Once the timeout value is reached, the Venu goes back to the home screen, without any kind of feedback for the remaining notifications.
On the other hand, if you do interact with the first notification, things are getting even worse. Supposing you dismiss the first notification, no matter if you do it just after you receive it or before the 30-second timeout, the second notification is then displayed along with the typical vibration. Do this again and you’ll see the third notification, one more time with a vibration, and so on until all notifications are displayed.
Now imagine you’re in a supermarket in the checkout line getting ready to pay with Garmin Pay when someone sends you a bulk of messages. Naturally, Venu receives them all, waiting for input. At this point, you can either wait for the 30-second timeout to be reached, so the smartwatch goes back to the home screen, or dismiss notifications one by one manually to finally be able to launch Garmin Pay.
A third option, which would come down to the user manually ignoring all notifications and going back to the home screen at any time, doesn’t exist simply because Garmin doesn’t allow Venu users to customize the two side buttons in any way. So in one way or another, you’re forced to deal with the whole notification madness every time.
As if being stuck with notifications on the screen wasn’t enough, reading notifications from the notification center has a pretty similar behavior. Each notification generates a vibration that doesn’t make any sense, despite being there for quite some time.
I’ve spent the last several hours searching the web for more information in an attempt to figure out if this notification behavior is a feature or a bug but unsurprisingly, Garmin doesn’t say a single thing about it. While I do think it’s a bug, considering the Venu launched so many months ago, it’s unacceptable for a company the size of Garmin to ignore such a frustrating issue which could easily render the smartwatch useless from time to time.
And speaking or bugs or features, I still can’t understand why I’m only getting a short vibration for incoming calls and the smartwatch doesn’t keep vibrating until I interact with the call in one way or another.
These are approaches that don’t make any sense, and at the same time, which Garmin doesn’t discuss by any means, leaving users searching for solutions all alone in an attempt to fix a $350 smartwatch.
To help Garmin refine the Venu, I created a list of things the company needs to improve as soon as possible:
- Allow users to configure the side buttons (and add an option to go back to the screen instantly)
- Add an option for the side button to launch Garmin Pay regardless of the active screen
- Allow users to configure timeout time in seconds (not pre-defined values like short, medium, and long)
- Display all notifications one by one when a bulk is received (like on the Fenix line)
- Enable longer vibrations for incoming calls
- Disable vibrations when reading notifications from the notification center
- Start responding to feedback and stop ignoring users’ bug reports