Garmin has moved fast to offer this Plus model of the Venu 2. Having launched the original second-gen watch in 2021, the Venu 2 Plus isn't a complete repositioning, instead it's here to focus on added voice support.

The aim is to make this a better-connected device, a better rival to WearOS devices or the Apple Watch series, letting it do a little more. But just how much does voice functionality really add to the Garmin experience?

Our quick take

The Garmin Venu 2 Plus is a watch that makes a bold step forward for Garmin. While the feature list is studded with familiar functions that you'll find on Garmin's other devices, the addition of voice opens up a new world of options for this as a smartwatch.

However, the experience of using voice doesn't match using it on a native device - and it can't compete with Apple Watch or a Wear OS device in terms of what it will do and how smoothly that happens. That leaves voice on the Venu 2 Plus as only useful in some instances: you can take or place a call through your watch when your phone is out of reach, you can fire out commands to smart home devices, you can request other information - but when the results involve using the display things can fall apart rather quickly.

The real strength of the Venu 2 Plus remains in Garmin's heritage, as the sports functionality is excellent, while the great display and compelling battery life make for a great overall watch experience.

Garmin Venu 2 Plus - 4.0 / 5

FORAGAINST
  • All the skills of Garmin's sport platform
  • Quality design
  • Great display
  • Voice control functions
  • One size only
  • Voice control easily confused
  • Lacks speaker & headphone control

Design and build

  • Dimensions: 43.6 x 43.6 x 12.6mm / Weight: 51g
  • Stainless steel bezel and back
  • 20mm quick-release strap
  • 5ATM water-resistance

The design of the Garmin Venu 2 Plus is instantly familiar, because it's similar to previous Venu devices and not too far removed from the design of other touchscreen devices, namely the Garmin Vivoactive.

Garmin Venu 2 Plus photo 14
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There are three buttons on the right-hand side of the Venu 2 Plus' body and, like most other Garmin devices, it pairs a fibre-reinforced polymer body with more premium materials for the back and the bezel.

This helps give the Venu a superior look, avoids damage around the edge of the display, and ensures that it feels nice to wear. Here it offers stainless steel, with three colour options: pictured is the Cream Gold with Ivory, but it's also available in Powder Grey or Black.

The new model comes in a 43mm case size only, with the Venu 2 offering both 40 and 45mm in the existing version. The Plus, therefore, seems to be a model to fit between the two, perhaps a sign that Garmin is going to settle on one size rather than having a small and large offering of every device going forwards.

Important to note, however, is that the display is actually the same size, so while the body is slimmed down, it doesn't sacrifice on the screen dimension to do so.

Garmin Venu 2 Plus photo 15
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The strap is 20mm and quick release, so you'll be able to swap it out easily enough to change the style of the watch, from sporty to more formal - or just to change the colour.

There's 5ATM waterproofing - that's to 50m deep - while the face of the watch is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3.

It's all about the display

  • Touchscreen AMOLED display
  • 416 x 416 resolution

The Venu is all about its display. This is the thing that really makes it stand apart from the other devices in Garmin's range. It's is AMOLED for starters, offering a much brighter and colourful presentation than you'll get from a Forerunner or Fenix. The graphics change slightly for the Venu to stand it apart from the other sports devices that Garmin offers and draw more attention to its display.

Garmin Venu 2 Plus photo 1
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There's also a switch to touchscreen operation for a range of functions. Most Garmin devices rely on the buttons for control and navigation, but here you have an either/or operation - and sometimes both.

The important thing is that when you're in an activity, you can still use the buttons for functions such as stopping and starting, as well as selecting things and laps, but other elements work better via touch. In some ways the user interface is a bit of a mash-up between what you'll find elsewhere on Garmin's devices, and a few tweaks to accommodate touch control.

It is very much like the Vivoactive in that sense and doesn't really take things as far as the Apple Watch when it comes to fluid touch functionality on the small screen. Perhaps the biggest indicator of the limitations of touch are that Garmin still relies on long-presses on the buttons to really get things going. 

Garmin Venu 2 Plus photo 7
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That's a major indicator that this really isn't a user interface that's designed well enough to be touch only - and in many cases, we could see sticking the system on the Forerunner (which uses buttons instead of touch) might be just as good.

Expanding into voice

  • Siri, Google Assistant, Bixby support
  • Integrated speaker and microphone
  • Calling support

The big new addition for the Venu 2 Plus is voice support. This is something that Apple and Google have naturally supported within their own ecosystems, with third-party devices often being left out.

There are two sides to the new additions here. The first is the ability to make calls. This isn't entirely new - Garmin devices have for a long time told you when someone is calling and allowed you to accept or reject those calls - but now you can also initiate calls, and use a speaker and microphone on the watch, all Dick Tracy style.

Garmin Venu 2 Plus photo 3
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You'll be able to do this via a dial pad on the watch itself, or through contacts, so you can place those calls. You'll need to be connected via a smartphone - there's no cellular connectivity - but this does open up a range of options.

Calling allows you to take a call on the watch, handing it off to the phone or muting the mic via on-screen controls. Placing a call is similarly easy and you can use voice to call a contact and it all works nicely.

There's one oddity, in that it only wants to do this through the watch's speaker, it doesn't appear to be compatible with headphones connected to the watch via Bluetooth - something that also plagues voice assistant interaction as we'll detail below. 

However, the speaker on the Venu 2 Plus is actually pretty good and callers reported that we sounded clear enough - and in a quiet environment, we had no problem hearing incoming calls either.

Garmin Venu 2 Plus photo 2

The second side of the equation is support for smart assistants on your phone. If you're an Apple user this will be Siri, while on Android devices it will be Google Assistant. For those using a Samsung phone, there's also support for Bixby. As Android users will know, you get to choose the default voice assistant on your phone and you can also opt for Alexa, although Garmin says this isn't fully supported. 

You'll be able to fire up your smart assistant through your watch, so you can then just speak to your Venu 2 Plus and get Siri or Google to do whatever you want - turn on the heating, etc. Both will also read notifications on demand, but you're limited in what you can actually do with them - and it's a much smoother experience just using the phone directly. 

With Google Assistant

Getting the Venu 2 Plus to work with Google Assistant is fairly easy, but you'll have to make sure you grant permissions via Garmin Connect, as well as ensure that Google Assistant itself is setup correctly on your phone. You'll have to allow private information via headphones via the settings to get it all to work smoothly, because your phone will think it's a set of headphones that it's talking to.

Pressing the button will then open a link to Google Assistant, allowing you to speak. The watch is purely a link to the phone, so you'll see everything happening on the screen of your phone and it's similiar to any other Google Assistant interactions. Again, we only managed to get responses back through the watch's speaker, so if you have headphones connected to your watch, you'll find that it will ignore those. We've also requested music through the watch, which plays on the watch rather than on any connected headphones. 

While it's an addition to Garmin's skills, it feels like there's a lot of work to be done to refine the system, as it's really not very hard to get it to fall over. There are limitations and that means it's not as useful as you might want it to be - you might find that having headphones that offer Google Assistant connected to your phone directly offer a better experience. A couple of weeks after testing on Android, for example, and the watch now says there's no connected phone for voice commands, despite it still being connected for notifications. 

With Siri

The experience with Siri is similar to the experience you get with Google Assistant.

You can trigger the voice assistant from the watch and make various requests. A straight action request works well enough, but again, any request to play music would see music playing through the watch. That means you can use it to control music on your phone via voice, but you'd be better off again with a pair of headphones that support Siri directly on your phone, as it won't play through headphones you have connected. 

In some ways Siri setup is a little smoother than on Android (we ran into fewer permissions we had to grant), but both quickly run towards a dead-end if you ask too much, often resulting in you needing to unlock your phone.

Features and performance

  • GPS, altimeter, compass
  • Blood oxygen
  • Sleep tracking

As is normal for Garmin devices, the Venu 2 Plus is loaded with sensors to track what you're doing and how you're doing it. That covers the normal GPS, accelerometers, compass, barometric altimeter and heart rate sensor, so your watch knows what you're doing and the stresses that's putting on your body.

It's compatible with third-party sensors if you want more data and there's support for a wide range of sports so you can get the information you want on the display whether you're running, cycling, stand-up paddleboarding or in a yoga session.

Garmin Venu 2 Plus photo 18
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Garmin wants to look after a lot more than just your workouts: it will detect steps and floors climbed, offer to track your hydration and your sleep. It will also offer period and pregnancy tracking for women.

The aim is to be a complete view of your lifestyle, offsetting your exercise against your sleep to track your recovery, helping you set goals and achieve them, and be a daily companion in your quest to stay active. All this data is fed into Garmin Connect, as well as summarised on the Venu 2 Plus' display, letting you scroll through "glances" into your daily wellbeing.

The performance of this watch matches similar devices, like Forerunner, Fenix and older Venu models. It's relatively quick to locate GPS, gives a good reading for heart rate and returns accurate results at the end of workouts, within the normal ranges we'd expect. That makes it a great choice for anyone wanting an activity tracking companion - and you'd expect nothing less from Garmin.

screens photo 1

For cardio in those main sports of running or cycling, there's plenty of information to crawl through in Garmin Connect, with easy syncing to services like Strava if you'd rather use that system instead. For those doing strength workouts, there's now a nice display of the muscles you're working when you enter the details of the type of strength exercise you've completed. 

Beyond tracking the sports you're performing - and that could be anything from walking to stand-up paddleboarding or snowboarding - the Venu 2 Plus will play its part in tracking other body systems. It will track your sleep as well as your daily activity (including your steps) and feed it all into the Body Battery system that will give you a sense of how well recovered you are. It's designed to highlight that it's not just about the exertion, it's also about the rest that comes after it. The Body Battery system, if you go all-in on it, is a really interesting and holistic approach to your fitness and wellbeing.

The Venu 2 Plus also supports Garmin Pay for mobile payments, so if your bank is supported you can add your card to your watch via Garmin Connect and then call it up to pay when you see a contactless checkout, meaning you can just tap to pay for that coffee rather than digging out your phone.

Garmin Venu 2 Plus photo 27

Music is supported from the likes of Spotify, Deezer or Amazon Music so you can listen offline through connected headphones. This involves connecting your watch to Wi-Fi so it can download nominated playlists from those providers. Connecting headphones is fairly simple too, and when you tap the middle button to open music, when you press play you'll be prompted to select the device you want to play through, including the watch's speaker.

Music is designed to work in this offline fashion through this watch and interaction is simple enough with that additional middle button - indeed, it's simpler than on some other Garmin devices supporting music because you can just hit the middle button at any time to go straight to music controls. You just need to remember to pair your headphones and download those tracks.

Battery life

  • 9 days battery
  • 8 hours of GPS

The advantage that Garmin has over something like the Apple Watch is battery life. Even on this watch with a more vibrant display, Garmin manages to outlast the Apple device by a factor of about five. There is of course a difference in how these watches run and what you're asking them to do, with Garmin coming from a position of doing slightly less and waiting for you to fire up a run. 

Charging comes via a cable you plug into the back, and there's no wireless charging here, but it's quick to charge and something you'll only have to do once a week. 

The cited endurance of the battery is 9 days in smartwatch mode. That wouldn't include GPS tracking and once you fire up an activity it's putting much greater demand on the power reserves as it's sampling a lot more data, hence it then will only last for 8 hours. 

The actual usage you'll get sits somewhere in the middle of these figures. You can use it for about a week, with a couple of workouts, but if you're going out for long rides, for example, you'll find you get through that battery a lot faster.

However, we've found that it will often just get to the end of its battery and turn off. The last couple of times this has happened during testing there's been no warning prior at all.

To recap

The Plus version of the Venu 2 takes the foundation of the original and expands it with voice assistance (via a connected phone). That increases the number of smartwatch functions available, but there are some downsides to using voice. That said, support for sports - which is Garmin's foundation - remains exemplary here.