What is the Garmin Venu and how does it compare to the Vivoactive 4

The most recent Garmin leak indicated a brand new watch would be launching called the Garmin Venu.

Not a great deal of information is available about it yet, the leaks consisted of high quality renders and that is about it. With the other Garmin watches launching at IFA being focussed more on the casual market it would be safe to assume this is also one of the more casual options, rather than the athlete focussed Forerunner and Fenix line-up.

There have been a few rumours about the Vivoactive 4 adopting an AMOLED display, and it looks like Garmin could be doing this with the Venu instead, placing it as a premium alternative.

In particular, the home screen clock image of the Venu show a coloured gas design which could indicate a higher resolution than the Vivoactive 4. The current Vivoactive 3 uses 240 x 240 pixels and I doubt it could pull off an image such as that.

Garmin Venu 43mm
Garmin Vivoactive 4s

The Venu should be fractionally smaller than the Vivoactive 4 with a 43mm case compared to a 44mm. It also appears to have a superior design and build compared to the Vivoactive, though as these are renders it is hard to tell for sure. In particular, the outer bezel looks similar to the metal one found on the Fenix 5S.

In terms of functionality, it appears to offer the same things as the Vivoactive 4. This includes the usual fitness tracking and workouts, but also music and NFC for payments.

My best guess at the moment is that it has everything that the Vivoactive 4 will have but in a more attractive design, superior build quality and higher quality screen.

Garmin will likely be eager to target the increasingly popular smartwatch market. The music and payments integration have already shown that they are eager to offer more mainstream features compared to the likes of Suunto and Polar.

Some rumours have indicated WearOS, I would love to see how Garmin approaches this, but I am sceptical of them launching something with it due to battery drain and then having to maintain two watch operating systems.