The Venu Sq Music is the budget version of Garmin’s Venue smartwatch, which comes with offline music playback capabilities. It has a square face and still retains majority of the feature set from its more premium Venu. The Garmin Venu Sq Music retails for S$379.
Unboxing
Inside the box, you will find:
- Garmin Venu Sq Music smartwatch
- User manual
- Charging cable
Tech specs
Click here to see the full list of tech specs provided by Garmin.
Build quality and design
The Garmin Venu Sq Music adopts the Apple Watch square shaped watch face design, which measures 40mm. The watch case is made from fiber-reinforced polymer while the bezel features a matte anodized aluminum. While it doesn’t feel as premium as Garmin’s flagship, the build quality still feels pretty solid.
The rubber strap that comes with the Venu Sq Music feels soft and flexible, and I particularly like that the hook as a little knob at the end to lock trailing strap so it doesn’t come off easily. The Garmin Venu Sq is also water-resistant to 50m, so you can bring it for your swims or shower together with it.
Garmin Connect App and Connect IQ Store
The Garmin Connect App is the main companion app that you have to download in order to use the Venu Sq Music smartwatch. It is also the app where you can view all the health and fitness metrics in greater detail. The Connect IQ store is not compulsory but it makes your smartwatch experience with the Venu Sq more complete, and allows you to download apps like Spotify.
You have 7MB worth of storage to install apps. You can install widgets, watch fields, data fields and apps.
Display
Instead of the AMOLED display found on the more premium Venu, the Venu Sq Music utilizes a LCD display which is 240 x 240 pixels. The LCD is good enough, but you won’t get the higher contrast and deep blacks. Unless you’re comparing both watches side by side, the LCD display won’t be looking inferior. There is a large bezel surrounding the display so it the screen isn’t as big as you think it is.
By default, the Venu Sq Music is set to raise-to-wake mode, but you can toggle the always-on display mode by changing the timeout duration to ‘Always On’. With regards to watch faces, there are some standard ones onboard the watch itself. But if you want to have more watch faces to choose from then you’ll have to download the Connect IQ store app.
User interface
Venu Sq Music has a touch based interface with the two hardware buttons on the display coming in handy when you’re working out or have sweaty or wet hands. The button on the top functions as a ‘Yes’, while the bottom button functions as a ‘Back’.
On the watch face screen, a single tap of the top button will bring you to the workouts app, while holding it down will bring you to a control menu. The button at the bottom requires a long hold to bring up the settings page. You can also set a shortcut via right swipe, and access your widgets by swiping up and down on the screen.
Check out a short video demo below:
Fitness and health tracking
The main reason of getting a Garmin watch is its fitness tracking capabilities. The Venu Sq Music has built-in GPS which is rather accurate for tracking your route during your runs. There are also other sensors such as Garmin’s Elevate heart rate monitor, accelerometer, pulse ox sensor for blood oxygen, and an altimeter to track elevation.
Running
My main testing for fitness tracking was to use it for my runs. Using the running mode, I had to wait for about 1 minute or so for the GPS to lock on and get ready for tracking. During the run, the Venu Sq Music will vibrate to let you know every time you complete 1km of distance and show you the lap time for that kilometer lap.
There is plenty of post-run data in the Garmin Connect app. Statistics such as pace, heart rate, elevation, cadence, and stride are all available for you to make use of. You can refer to the following images below for a better understanding:
Health – heart rate, sleep, etc
The Venu Sq Music also does sleep tracking and it able to categorize your sleep duration into the four stages of sleep: (1) awake, (2) light sleep, (3) deep sleep, and (4) REM. I found the sleep tracking to be rather accurate on when it marked me as being ‘awake’. You can also view your respiration data when sleeping via the breaths per minute metric. And if you enable the pulse oximeter feature, Venu Sq Music is also able to track the SpO2 you’re getting during your sleep.
Heart rate monitoring is a pretty standard feature, and it is also tracked well with the Venu Sq Music. The app lets you see a graph of your heart rate throughout the day, and also tells you your resting hear rate.
There are also other metrics under Garmin’s Health & Performance tab such as ‘Stress’ and ‘Body Battery’ which you might find insightful.
Offline music
Venu Sq Music being the music edition of the Venu Sq, allows you to stream and download offline music into the smartwatch from streaming services such as Spotify, Amazon Music, and Deezer. If such music services aren’t your thing, you can load music to Venu Sq Music using the old school .mp3 method. Personally, I have tested the music feature using my Spotify.
For Spotify, you are required to have a Premium subscription. Once you have logged into Spotify on the Venu Sq Music, you will be able to see a list of playlists which you can download to the watch. You have about 3GB of storage which you can use to download music. I tested listening to music during my runs on my Jaybird Vista, and I did not encounter any playback interruptions. It feels liberating to go for runs with just my Venu Sq Music watch
Battery life
Garmin says the Venu Sq Music can last up to 6 days of battery life on a full charge. With always-on display disabled, I am getting around 5 days of use before the battery hits 10%. And when I enable always-on display, I am getting around 3-4 days before the battery falls to 10%. Enabling Pulse Oximeter will also take a hit on battery life, so if you’re not keen on the SpO2 stats, you may well turn it off.
Charging the Venu Sq Music is done on the back and you have to insert the cable into a port. A magnetic charging cradle like on the Amazfit GTS 2e would have been a nicer touch.
Conclusion
If you want a Garmin smartwatch that is able to play your favourite tunes from your curated Spotify playlist then the Venu Sq Music is the one for you. It contains some of the best features from Garmin watches has and placed them in a relatively compact and comfortable watch. At S$379, it is not exactly that affordable and topping up another SS$40 will get you the Apple Watch SE. But if fitness is more of your focus, then the Garmin Venu Sq Music may have more appeal. Or if the music streaming integration isn’t really you’re thing, you can opt for the regular Venu Sq for S$299.