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Is the sleep tracking really that bad on Garmin Venu?

4703647
over 4 years ago

Hi there,

I'm not the Venu owner yet but I'm close to buying one as my 3 years old Fitbit Ionic is slowly giving up and the new Versa is just not my style at all.
I love the look of Venu and I know it's probably one of the best fitness trackers out there. I workout 5-6 times a week. Weight lifting, HIIT, jogging - whatever I feel like on a certain day. I'm sure Venu would do an amazing job tracking all of my workouts and daily calories. However I've managed to find out that the actual sleep tracking on the Garmin devices is basically next to useless. Is that really the case? I mean, I'm a shift worker and I often go to bed at different times. Sometimes I will read a book for an hour before bed. Sometimes I'll just play a game on my phone for 30min before sleep. It's all just super random. My Fitbit had absolutely zero problems detecting my sleep, like zero zero problems. It's all always very accurate (as much as it can be on a wrist device) and it always knows exactly when I fell asleep and woke up. It detects my naps if I ever have one during the day. It's really good. I'm wondering if Venu will be anywhere near as good.
I like the Body Battery function on the Garmin devices but then again if sleep tracking is that bad how can the body battery be accurate?

I would really like to know if it's really as bad as some people say?

Thank you.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Yes, I can tell you, Don t buy this watch only for this.. 

    But the garmin is very good on other points. 

    Good GPS, sport tracking, data fields, connection with phone, battery

    Bad sleep tracking, 

    Is it a sport and fitness watch, it is not really a health watch. 

    Most of time, if you read, she will say you are sleeping, Don t know if you move a little too much, you need to really be wake up and go to the toilet for example. If not it will not be detect. 

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    I bought the Venu to replace a Fitbit Versa (Special Edition, if it matters).  When I first bought it, it would have me "sleeping" when I was reading or watching TV.  But the Versa improved sleep tracking dramatically last year and it became much spot-on, with the exception of short naps during the day.

    The Venu's sleep tracking is a throwback to earlier times, when being relatively motionless is registered as sleep. It's pretty bad and I have to correct it virtually every day.  Garmin doesn't know how to do sleep tracking and it should roll in FirstBeats sleep tracking on the Venu, which should hopefully help with accuracy.  But there is no announcement of any kind regarding improving sleep tracking.

    On the other hand, the Venu is far superior to Fitbit in most other areas, including heart rate accuracy and GPS accuracy and lock. It also provides more detailed data in some areas.

    Garmin does not sync with Cronometer, or Withings, which is an issue for me, as calories are not accurately transferred.

    Garmin is also weird in the activities it provides:  it has Golf, but it doesn't have Hiking or Trail Running, both of which among the most common activities for most people.  This is just stupid, IMO, and it detracts from the experience.  For Hiking, I found the app Hike2, which is great and it addresses the problem for me.

    Overall, I am happier with Garmin than I ever was with Fitbit, but there are some frustrating issues, such as sleep tracking.

    Also, I do not believe that Garmin Pay works with American Express, which is another significant drawback for me. (Someone should correct me if I am wrong on this).

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Yes. You know what's funny?

    Found it interesting how the FR245 got sleep tracking. The venu/va4 are in the same price bracket and are more targeted towards features like lifestyle, which sleep falls under. At this point, the 245 is probably the watch with the most value because of how many new firstbeat stuff got added on to it after its initial release. Kind of salty because the 245 already has way more firstbeat algorithms and isn’t even targeted towards “health/wellness/lifestyle” and is at a comparable price. In the case of the Venu, the 245 is less expensive. Lmao'd. They use the logic that the Venu doesn't have training effect and training load because it isn't a training watch, but the 245 gets confirmation of firstbeat sleep tracking coming to it? Then bring training load and training effect to the Venu/VA4 because *** doesnt make sense. You would assume that a device marketed towards lifestyle health and wellness  SLEEP Tracking would be higher on the priority list. *** this

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to 3009614

    Feel ya bro, this is my last garmin device... A $%&#! Beta device that bever worked for more than 2 weeks before a complete reset was nedeed... It truly suuuuck.. I got a Samsung GVA2 that so far have never crashed once since April, not to mention it keeps getting actual feature updates, years after release!

    And it was cheaper...

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to 3009614

    Exactly my thoughts :-)) I posted it in the Forerunner 745 forum where is a thread called sleep widget...

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    I guess I will just hold on with buying the Venu then and maybe just keep an eye on the situation hoping that Garmin will soon improve sleep tracking on this device. Massive disappointment tbh but what can you do.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to 4703647

    DO NOT BUY THIS WATCH IF YOU REQUIRE SLEEP TRACKING!!!

     Already confirmed; "NO MORE FEATURES FOR VENU/VA4" !!!

    And the watch sucks, still after years of updates it only functions for 14 days, tops! Then you'll need to hardreset the device for basic funtions to resume... sometimes you even have to hardreset after each workout!!!

    I feel completely cheated....

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to 3185294

    Lmao and the cheaper 245 gets more updates. Got it. It gets something (sleep widget) that it shouldn't even have, given it's a training watch. Some people want a better looking watch with a better display. When the watch is marketed as having "Advanced Sleep Monitoring" on the website as a main selling point, yet on the Forerunner 245 it doesn't mention sleep anywhere on the buying page and it still gets advanced sleep, that is just ***. https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/628939 vs https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/643260 . Just scroll down. 

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    I have to edit the sleep/wake times often on mine but the sleep pattern is similar to what I remember from my last couple of devices. It doesn’t take naps into account. I’d say it’s ok, it’s not the most important feature for me so ok is good enough. Body battery seems pretty close to how energetic or tired I feel regardless. It’s neat but not super useful imho. 

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to 9241897

    I bought the venu 2 days ago and had it on for 2 nights now. The sleep tracking is definitely not as accurate as fitbit's. For example my awake times according to garmin was 3 minutes total last night. I know that this is totally wrong. With fitbit I would normally get around 1hr awake every night. Also falling asleep time is a bit wrong too.

    Here's my usual night with fitbit.

    And here's my night with Garmin.

    I knew what the sleep tracking on garmin would be before I decided to buy it so I'm not complaining. But there's a lot of room for improovement.