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Venu 3 data accuracy and coordination with Connect/Garmin servers

Venutianiii
14 days ago

Today I discovered a new wrinkle with Garmin data gathering on my Venu 3.  I had been quite dissatisfied with the watch reporting via Connect since the last couple of updates, since it didn't seem to track my own experience and data I was getting from my Oura ring. I was trying to get a better handle on my steps per minute and realized I did not have Auto activity start enabled. After setting this up I noticed a few interesting changes overall. My battery life had been about 5 days remaining, but that went down to 3% after one day. My sleep, stress and minimum heart rate had been less accurate since the updates. Now it was suddenly much better.

My speculation is that the watch is not sampling nearly as often when Auto activity start is not enabled. Mostly it is fudging the data based upon a standard one-size-fits-all model with some minimal input from the watch. This does a fantastic job of preserving battery life, but at the expense of data accuracy. 

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  • 0 14 days ago
    Venutianiii said:
    My speculation is that the watch is not sampling nearly as often when Auto activity start is not enabled.

    You can also start activities manually, which is even better than relying on the auto-start, since the auto-start starts activities with a delay of up to several minutes, and it does not always recognize the activity type accurately. Otherwise, you are right, the HR sensor works in low power mode with lower sampling rate, when no activity is in progress. That's by design, and the exact purpose why you can (and should) start activities when you need detailed and accurate monitoring. Monitoring your HR in the full power mode when you do nothing would have little sense, and only waste the battery, but if you really need it, you could always start an activity and keep it running all the day (not for the sleep hours though, since an open activity would prevent the sleep recording).

  • 0 14 days ago in reply to trux

    This is a very useful piece of info, especially since I was getting ready to ditch the watch. The difference in overall accuracy is profound- so much so that I might consider the Venu 3 to have been a device on par with the $40 Chinese sport bands that are available on Amazon, if it wasn't possible to crank up the sampling rate via auto activity start. The unfortunate thing is that this cuts battery life roughly in half. What is also puzzling is that for the first several months or so that I owned the watch, this was not an issue. It wasn't until some firmware updates in May and June that I detected noticeably less accurate results. 

  • 0 14 days ago in reply to Venutianiii

    In your place I would rather post on the Venu 3 forum. Other users of the same model can tell you whether they have the same experience or not. Here, on the Connect Web forum, there may not be many Venu 3 users able to comment.