SMASH HIIT Garmin Venu 2

This fantastic fitness watch packs a punch, featuring a new heart rate sensor and a beautiful AMOLED screen

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Garmin finally made a fitness smartwatch that’s actually usable and doesn’t look too bad either. Better still, the battery life is pretty impressive for an AMOLED watch. The Venu 2 has stayed true to its roots in terms of offering a more fitness-y experience; it just does it way better than previous iterations.

The 1.3-inch AMOLED touchscreen display has a resolution of 416 x 416 pixels and it even has an optional always-on mode. The AMOLED screen really brings the widget view of the Garmin OS to life and all the milestone animations, like when you hit your step goals, look way better on the pretty screen.

Battery life is a category the watch really excels in. Officially, it offers ‘up to’ 11 days in smartwatch mode; with GPS on, battery life is 22 hours and 8 hours if you listen to music as well. Now, this might not sound amazing but this is an AMOLED smartwatch, which tends to have a battery life of a day or two, max.

There are plenty of new workout modes in the Garmin Venu 2. First of all, the new Muscle Maps are an illustration showing which muscles are worked during the strength training session. But they only tell you which muscles are activated by certain workouts rather than how much they were actually worked, making them only helpful if you don’t know push-ups work the pecs.

Other new features are slightly better. The new HIIT workout mode has a ‘free’ mode tracking heart rate and calories burned but you can also download HIIT workouts from the Garmin Connect app or use the Venu 2 as a HIIT timer. As for the new bouldering mode, you can set a grading system so the watch knows how difficult the wall is you’re about to ascend.