Garmin’s Venu 3 Smartwatch Tracks Sleep Patterns
Today, Garmin is introducing the Venu 3 and Venu 3S smartwatches, which prioritize sleep-tracking and customization. Notably, these watches include a proactive sleep coaching feature and the ability to detect naps. This sets them apart from other popular smartwatches, such as those from Apple, Samsung, and Google, which only track sleep during the night. With the Venu 3 series, users can now have peace of mind knowing that their daytime sleep can also be monitored, if desired.
The company’s new sleep coach takes into account, among other things, the user’s daily activity levels, sleep history and heart rate variability (HRV) – which is the new sleep meter of the Venu series. The coach gives recommendations on the amount of sleep for the next day. The naps detected by Venu 3 also go into replenishing energy levels using the company’s Body Battery tool, which measures energy levels on a scale of 1-100 depending on activity consumption.
In addition to the sleep tracking updates, Venu 3 has many other improvements compared to its predecessor. In particular, it introduces a wheelchair mode that tracks pushes instead of steps, as well as hand-cycling activities and pre-loaded exercises for wheelchair users, offering more participation. The new watch also offers expanded insights into how exercise can affect the wearer and how much time is needed to recover after each gym session.
In addition, Garmin brings a “perceived exertion” feature that allows users to report how challenging the workout felt. With this, the company is trying something new in the fitness arena. Instead of just crunching numbers, it dips its toes into subjective data – the kind of information that involves personal judgment and individual experiences. Venu 3 also introduces “interval creation,” which allows a runner or cyclist to build interval workouts from the watch face.
In addition to expanding health and fitness tracking capabilities, Garmin says this watch has a built-in speaker and microphone that allow the wearer to make calls from the watch. The Venu 3 can also display photo messages on its AMOLED touchscreen. You can make contactless payments with Garmin Pay and also stream music from Spotify and Amazon Music.
The Venu 3 starts at $449.99 and offers up to 14 days of battery life in smartwatch mode. It has a lightweight stainless steel frame and silicone bands in either white or black, and the smaller 3S comes in five strap colors.
It is still unclear whether the older Venu models will receive software updates that will enable these new features. But for a mainstream smartwatch from a company that caters mostly to the fitness-focused crowd, the Venu 3 seems to be a step up.
