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Expensive smartwatch

Review: Garmin Venu X1 - Luxury watch with large screen

Garmin hasn't skimped on its latest smartwatch, but is it the right priority?

Elias Nordling
Published

Garmin has a bewildering array of watches with different niches towards the smartwatch or sports watch direction, not to mention watches for adventurers and golfers. The Venu series has a clear smartwatch profile rather than a sports watch, and the new Venu X1 goes all in with a price tag of 9000 kronor.

At that price, you usually find ultra-durable smartwatches like the Apple Watch Ultra, but in the Garmin Venu X1, the focus is instead on a thin watch made of premium materials with an extra-large screen.

The watch has a square OLED screen of two inches with sapphire glass, and a titanium back, but a frame in fibre-reinforced polymer, that is, plastic. The back looks a bit stuck on and my first thought is that the watch is ugly, but I get used to it, and it is at least thin, 7.9 mm, and sits well on the wrist despite its size. A stepless nylon strap is included, but the strap attachment is of a standardised watch type so you can easily get hold of an alternative strap. A fun detail is that there is a flashlight on the side of the watch that can illuminate smaller spaces if needed.

Large but not fast

The large screen is bright and works well in daylight, but I'm not sure that the focus on the screen plays to Garmin's strengths. The watch is controlled with two buttons and swipes, and Garmin's watch system is pleasant and intuitive, but does not have nearly as fast a response as the Apple Watch, and it becomes more apparent the larger the screen is. If it's a flashy watch you're after, Garmin struggles to impress.

This is instead a functional watch, and in this area, Garmin has not skimped. The watch faces you can choose from are rich in information, and there are more to download in the app store. Health data is found in the form of widgets that you scroll through, providing clear and comprehensive information. The watch measures everything you expect, such as steps, heart rate, sleep, breathing rate, number of stairs, and more. You can also log a large number of different workouts, and you get a lot of information during ongoing training, even if you don't get as much running data as from some of Garmin's more expensive running watches.

You can receive notifications from selected apps on the watch, and if it's messaging apps, it's of course nice to be able to read them on a larger screen. You should also be able to view attached images in messages on the watch if you have an Android phone. However, it's only images from SMS that I can get to work. I ask Garmin, who explains that it is controlled by how the messaging apps display notifications on the phone. If the app supports it and you have set the notifications so that attached images are displayed directly in the notification, they will also appear on the watch. I can't zoom in on the images, so I think the usefulness of the larger screen for this is limited.

If you have an Android phone, you can also reply to messages without taking out your phone. For iPhone, Apple has restricted this function so that it only works with Apple Watch. You can reply either with preset response phrases like yes, no, or OK, which you can input yourself in Garmin's app Connect, or with a keyboard. Then you get buttons with three letters per key like on an old-fashioned button phone, and it must be quicker to simply take out the phone in that situation.

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No Dictaphone

It would have been nice if you could also speak your replies. Because the watch has a microphone and speaker. As it is now, the speaker is used, for example, to announce kilometre time on runs, and you can also use the microphone and speaker as a headset for the phone. The sound is then about the same as from the speaker mode on the phone for the person I'm speaking with, while the sound from the watch is quite weak, so I have to turn it up to maximum volume to hear. It's not particularly practical to hold your wrist up to your mouth to talk for long periods, and a proper headset is preferable in every way. The microphone and speaker are therefore luxury features that I don't really think pay off. If the watch had support for esim so that you could make calls with the watch without the phone, it might have been another matter, but that function is missing in all watches from Garmin. When it comes to communication, it is entirely dependent on having the phone nearby.

However, you can download music to the watch and connect a headset to it so you can listen to music on your run without having to bring your mobile. There is support for Spotify, Youtube Music, and Deezer. If you get thirsty on the way and have forgotten to bring a payment card, you can also tap payments with the watch, Garmin Pay has good support for Swedish banks.

If you completely lose your way on the run, there is also a map function with terrain maps that can be displayed directly on the watch's screen. If you have your mobile with you, it is much easier to navigate with it, but the watch navigation is a nice backup function.

The battery life is stated to be 8 days in smartwatch mode, and I get that too, with regular workouts included. That's a lot for a smartwatch, but not for Garmin, which has many watches with better battery life than that. The watch is charged with Garmin's standard cable that comes with it, but the attachment is loose so I have to place the watch just right for it not to stop charging. I would have blamed this on a Monday model if it weren't for the fact that this is the second Garmin watch in a row I test with this problem.

Garmin Venu X1 is undoubtedly an excellent smartwatch, but it is expensive, and if I, for example, compare it with Vivoactive 6 which costs less than half, I find it hard to see that the larger screen, microphone, and speakers add enough value to justify the high price.

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