Is it possible to assign shortcuts to the hardware buttons? Ie. activate Garmin Pay via hardware button press?

1. Activate the screen (wrist gesture or double tap)
2. Swipe right
3. Enter four-digit passcode (PIN) to access the wallet (*)
4. You have 1 minute to made the payment with the last card used (or you can scroll stored cards to choose which one to use for the payment in case you have more than one card in the wallet)

(*) Owner's manual: TIP: After you successfully enter your passcode, you can make payments without a passcode for 24 hours while you continue to wear your watch. If you remove the watch from your wrist or disable heart rate monitoring, you must enter the passcode again before making a payment.

...But your band has to be really tight - every single HR measurement must be successful - not comfortable in my opinion. So I had to enter the passcode prior to each payment even HR on. I disabled HR monitoring to extend the battery life after initial tests.

I made hundreds of payments - not a single issue. So I can recommend Venu2 for contactless payments.

In the case you want to use the watch for sport/health/sleep/... tracking - spend some time to read this forum for known issues. Steps counter is incredible accurate, floors counter is useless.

I use the watch for payments and as notification repeater only, with AOD on and all sensors off the battery lasts 3 days for full charge (30%/day). Quite step-down compared to my previous watch (6 days for full charge). Charging is quite slow. Forced firmware updates are the biggest problem in my opinion.

Thank you very much for the detailed response. Your use case sounds just like mine (no interest in health features, just payments and notifications) so I have to ask, with HR monitoring disabled do you have to enter the PIN every 24 hours or every time you make a payment?

You are welcome.

With HR monitoring disabled you have to enter the PIN every time you make a payment.

It's the same in the case HR is on but the band is not really tight.

If the band is really tight, you will be theoretically asked for PIN every 24h. But even in this case the watch asked for the PIN few times.

Some additional notes for your use case:

• Incoming call notifications - the watch vibrates 2 times only and stops displaying callers name (it returns to the watch face) after 7 seconds even the phone is still ringing
• There's known problem affecting many users related to the BT pairing, see Repeated bluetooth pairing codes after disconnecting watch - in my case disconnect alerts as well as the watch re-connect is working without the issue
• The watch doesn't let you know there are some missing notifications (missed calls, new emails/messages) during the watch has been disconnected
• There's some delay in the BT disconnect notification (let's say 10 seconds) - you can miss some calls/notifications and you don't know you have to check the phone

Jeez, that's unfortunate. Looks like I'll be returning my watch as soon as it arrives as I have no interest in having to enter a code for every payment. Thanks again for your responses, they've been very helpful.

Give it a try. I don't know your country but maybe you can return the watch even it's opened/tested (you have 14 days for return in EU for example).

If tight band is not an issue for you (it is for me), let HR monitoring on (I don't think it use too much battery compared to the AOD for example).

To enter the PIN once per day (or maybe twice in reality - in my case some HR readings were probably missed because not enough tight band even it was toooo tight for me) should be acceptable.... You will see.

I had the watch for about two weeks now and I'm pretty happy with it. The batter lasts over a week and I don't have to enter the pin code to activate all that often, tho it is more often than I'd like. Two annoying things I noticed are that, one, when I get a notification from a messaging app, I only get subsequent notifications from the same app if I read the first one and, two, the battery indicator is way off. I charged the watch to 99% the first time (didn't go to 100 for some reason) and it discharged from 99 to 85 in the first day, whereas a few days later it lose 6-7% charge a day. Neither of those are huge issues but I would prefer getting all notifications and a consistent battery indicator.

9560816 said:

when I get a notification from a messaging app, I only get subsequent notifications from the same app if I read the first one

I think this is a function of either your phone or messaging app. With a Samsung phone and Google Messages the texts accumulate on my watch before I read them.