Garmin Venu 2 Plus GPS Watch Review

If you’re looking for a data-centric watch, if you practice multiple sports like triathlon, but you’re also looking for a watch that can satisfy you in the office, at the gym, on your bike, and in the pool, the Garmin Venu 2 Plus is for you.

By David Polveroni – Photos: ©DP/DR

The Garmin Venu 2 Plus is the top-of-the-range model in the sport and fitness category. It is therefore a product more oriented towards multisport than a specific sport, as we often see tested on 3bikes. However, the Venu 2 Plus has many features that can be of particular interest to athletes like us, because it is also a watch that follows the current trend of our society, allowing you to monitor yourself in almost all conditions.

We will be very simple in our description and review the elements that seem essential to us, because if you want to know all the features, everything is very well described on the Garmin website.

The Garmin Venu 2 Plus in detail: HERE

First of all, the watch must inevitably connect to your phone to take advantage of its main assets. To stand out from the features that we would consider classic for the cyclist that I am and which we generally have on our bike computers, we will have, in sports use:

• The ability to use voice assistance: Siri, Google Assistant or Bixby available on your watch with a push of the central button on your wrist. And thus make a call or listen to music or any other tasks (not yet coffee) without taking out your phone.
• Pay with Garmin Pay, very practical for bikepacking or breaks on long rides
• A wrist heart rate monitor: less accurate (verified) than a classic heart rate monitor, but which will nevertheless be useful for those who are not used to wearing a heart rate strap around their chest, and who will thus have an idea of the zone adopted, but also for women who may be bothered by the strap. A classic strap can also be connected, of course.

For daily use, we will find the same functions as when doing sports, namely using voice assistance, listening to music, paying with your watch, but also other more basic functions such as the stopwatch, countdown, alarm… in short, like a watch! With a customizable screen in addition…

Where the Venu 2 Plus clearly stands out from a classic watch is the more or less long-term monitoring of your so-called health data. Since the HR is recorded every second, even at night, you then have real tracking as you can have with a tracker like Whoop, even if the latter is more specialized and focuses only on that. Having had both, there is no comparison and the Garmin Venu 2 Plus will be much more versatile, and moreover there is no subscription to take out.

This watch is a daily tool for those who want to control their health data and thus be able to correlate certain things like recovery or sleep with a performance or underperformance. For me, the only negative point as a cyclist: the lack of connectivity with a power meter. But Garmin obviously offers this with a slightly higher-end watch like the Fenix.

So at €449, the budget can be substantial for some, but here you will have the best of what Garmin can do in this area. If you need a few less functions, the Venu 2 and 2S will then be able to tick many of the necessary criteria for your use, it’s up to you to choose!

=> SEE ALSO: Garmin Venu 2 or Venu 2S on sale

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