I just got a Venu 3s after having Fitbits for a while. I knew there would be some growing pains switching, but man, I didn't think I'd have to worry about the basics and some quality-of-life settings missing! Maybe mine is faulty??
Biggest Issue: It's not counting ANY distance doing Indoor Walk (on a walking pad). I keep this thing in my pocket when walking.
At first, it wasn't counting steps or distance. If I was vigorously swinging my arms with it on my wrist or had it in my non-dominant side's pocket it might eventually pick up a few steps (3-15) and 0.3 meters after 10-15~ mintues, but when I tried strapping it to my ankle (most common suggestion), steps and distance would remain at ZERO the entire time. Absolutely nothing picked up, except it never fails to have a heart rate reading, even when it's in my pocket.
I finally figured out it will count steps when in the pocket of my dominant side (with Fitbit I always kept it on the non-dominant side and both are set to that). So now it's counting my steps, but the distance is still staying 0. Isn't it supposed to calculate this with the accelerometer, like most every other pedometer out there? I've looked through Reddit and the forum, see that a few people have brought this issue up (and the ones below), and tried the scarce solutions I did see (like copying regular walk and turning off GPS, strapping to ankle, using Treadmill activity, data recording every second, etc.), but no change. Having to manually add the distance later in the app is not an acceptable solution at this price point. It seems to work as expected when walking outside (but with GPS).
Other issues:
- It Isn’t counting floors well. It misses most of the times I head up a flight of stairs. I won't say Fitbit was perfect, but it was capturing them at a higher rate.
- SmartThings isn’t available for the device that’s touted as the most ‘smart watch-like’. It's available for what seems like every other model, though.
- Can’t switch the orientation of the watch face unless I change the wrist setting, which my understanding is that would make the data less accurate, but it’s already inaccurate, I guess lol. I just want the buttons on the other side of the watch - other models have the ability to do this.
- In Garmin Connect, I can’t have distance in metric and weight in lbs, it’s either all metric or all imperial. I've seen others bring this up, too. Us quirky Canadians always getting the short end of the stick lol.
I really love the look of this watch and its other features, so if anyone has ideas on how to fix the distance issue at the very least, I would so appreciate it!
