Why you can trust TechRadar

We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.

One-minute review

The Garmin Venu 4 is a gem, and one that should satisfy moderate-to-serious exercise enthusiasts that want a great smartwatch with a generously sized battery and heavy focus on fitness. While it isn’t as rugged as the Forerunner, Instinct or Fenix range, this is a watch better-suited to people who want an unobtrusive, premium-looking watch for the office and a powerhouse for runs and rides, something between a Samsung Galaxy Watch and a regular Garmin.

operating system, as slick as it is, also has a few cumbersome quirks: I’m so used to Google and Apple’s raise-to-speak voice assistants that to use the upper button and touchscreen to get to Garmin’s voice assistant functionality, which I use to set kitchen timers and the like, seems almost archaic and counter-intuitive.

However, these are small niggles: generally speaking, the watch performs admirably. While the lack of full-color directional maps is disappointing, the interface works just fine when following courses during runs, and the voice assistant is as responsive as Siri, if not as sophisticated as on-device AI such as Gemini. The battery, said to be up to 12 days of use in smartwatch mode, is an accurate measurement: I wore the watch for around 10 days before needing to charge it, with quite a bit of working out. The heart rate readings from Garmin’s Elevate V5 sensor are accurate enough for all but elite athletes, but I’ll touch on that more in the Performance section of the review.

New health tools such as Lifestyle Logging and Health Status are useful, especially the self-reporting Lifestyle Logging structure, which allows you to assign tags to your day (caffeine, alcohol, healthy meals, heavy meals and so on) to show the effects of different stimuli on your metrics.

Garmin’s usual suite of outstanding metrics are present and correct: as a regular runner, I find stride length, cadence and so on useful for tweaking my technique, and Garmin’s Race Calendar and Primary Race widgets are second to none. It’s a worthy buy for anyone who wants a Garmin, but doesn’t like the outdoorsy look so many of them share.

Garmin Venu 4 at Amazon for $549.99

Apple Watch Ultra 3, which I also wore during this run, registered 155bpm. Still, 5bpm out across the entirety of the workout isn’t anything to worry about, and a good enough estimation to indicate the Elevate V5’s accuracy.

Battery life performs as described, too: the watch lasted a full 10 days with multiple workouts before needing a top-up. The Venu 4 was comfortable to use and better to sleep in than a lumpy Fenix – I hardly took it off all week.

Performance score: 4.5/5