Garmin Venu 3 is a true Apple Watch rival with 14-day battery life and nap detection

Garmin has announced the Garmin Venu 3, the latest in its lifestyle-orientated Venu series. Coming in two different sizes, the watch is packing Garmin’s advanced new sleep features, including Sleep Coach and nap detection, workout profiles specifically tailored to wheelchair users, and a 14-day battery life. The Garmin Venu 2 is top of our best Garmin watches list, and the Venu 3 promises to be even better.

The Garmin Venu 3 is available now, starting at $449.99 / £449.99 / AU$749.99, and is the same price for both the Venu 3 (45mm) and smaller Venu 3S (41mm) model. The Venu 3 is listed as having up to 14 days of battery life in smartwatch mode, with up to 26 hours in GPS-only mode. The 3S doesn’t last quite as long with 10 days of battery life, and 21 hours in GPS mode.  

Other details can be found on the specs table below, but otherwise, the two watches are pretty similar, with AMOLED screens, Corning Gorilla Glass 3, a stainless steel case, and a fiber-reinforced polymer bezel. All standard stuff we’ve come to expect from mid-range Garmin watches. 

What has changed are the features, starting with sleep. Sleep Coach now offers you personalized sleep advice, incorporating your exercise and recovery data in a new graph going forward. Naps are finally tracked automatically, so you can go to sleep and the watch will be able to tell within minutes, automatically rolling those naps into your recovery algorithm. Pretty impressive, even without factoring in all of Garmin’s usual sleep smarts such as skin temperature and heart rate variability tracking.

Wheelchair-based workout profiles offer wheelchair users a selection of customized workouts and unique insights, including number of pushes per day, weight shifting alerts checking for lateral movement, and animated on-wrist workouts to follow, which is a first for Garmin. These join other new sports features such as interval workout creation for running and cycling.

A built-in speaker and microphone allows you to take and receive calls on-wrist, just like one of the best Apple Watch models.

Garmin Venu 3: Specifications

Analysis: A surprise early reveal

Garmin’s sudden reveal of the Venu 3 a few days before IFA 2023, the biggest tech conference around right now, is very surprising. However, the Garmin Venu 3 is shaping up to be an incredible watch, with all sorts of new stuff we hadn’t even predicted.

Sleep Coaching and nap detection was definitely on the cards as we’d heard a few days before the announcement, but the addition of wheelchair-focused fitness features is fantastic news. Too long have wheelchair athletes had fewer meaningful ways to track their progress, and the addition of daily pushes and dedicated workout modes means wheelchair users have a dedicated place in Garmin’s design architecture. 

Otherwise, Garmin’s lifestyle-orientated smartwatch is going places, with the AMOLED screen, improved sleep tracking (Apple users must charge up to twice a day to get the sort of service Garmin can offer for up to two weeks) and on-watch call functionality. The Garmin Connect app is also an incredible training tool. 

For fitness enthusiasts, we see a real competitor, just like the old Venu, and a true Apple Watch rival. Not much has changed externally – after all, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – but we can’t wait to get the watch in hand.  

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