Garmin has launched a new watch, equipped for the first time with an AMOLED display, which is likely to increase its appeal against the likes of the Apple Watch. 

With an ever increasing selection of devices, the Garmin Venu not only supports all the sports functions you traditionally associate with Garmin - heart rate, workouts, advanced metrics - but it also offers an increased range of health tracking functions.

It covers sleep tracking, which most others do, it also offers menstrual cycle tracking, can detect irregular hearth beats and stress. It will also track your respiration rate and blood oxygen levels to give you a complete picture of your health.

Garmin Venu image 5
Garmin

For the last few years, Garmin has been increasing the smartwatch functionality of its devices and as such the Venu comes with support for downloaded music from services like Spotify - letting you workout without your phone - while also supporting mobile payments. 

That's on top of all the connectivity that will let you get notifications with smart replies on your wrist, add apps and make a wide range of customisations to the watch face.

Garmin is also introducing animated workouts, so you can see what you're supposed to be doing in that strength training session - and that's on top of the normal Garmin coaching and support for sports tracking that you get on other Garmin devices. 

Garmin Venu image 3
Garmin

While the feature set of this watch is huge, it's really the addition of that AMOLED display that makes the Venu special: the Garmin experience is really good, but using a new type of display will bring visual quality that's never been there before. 

That's one of the things that the Apple Watch is really good at delivering - it looks great no matter what it's actually doing. But there's a cost that comes with using an AMOLED display and that's often battery life. The Garmin Venu will last 5 days and fast charge - while the Garmin Vivoactive 4 - which is essentially the same watch with an LCD display (also newly announced) - will last for 8 days.

The Garmin Venu will cost $399.99 in the US and £329.99 in the UK and it will be available in Q4 2019.