Garmin Venu 2 vs Apple Watch Series 6 - Which one is right for you? By Chase the Summit

Yeah, this is how I get ready. Today's video is a topic. I've seen discussed a lot in the comments of some of my recent videos. I want to talk about the Apple Watch Series 6 and how it compares to the brand new Garmin venue 2. These two watches have a lot in common, but they're pretty different. At the same time.

That's what we're going to talk about today before we dive in though I do want to remind you to hit that thumbs up button and hit the subscribe button. If you do enjoy this video, it adds value to your life. I would appreciate that and if you are interested in anything, I show in this video I'll have it linked in the description down below, so you can find it pretty easily. Those links do help support my channel, but it costs nothing extra to you and this video is not sponsored or anything. It's just a topic.

I've seen discussed quite a bit online, so I wanted to try to address it in my own way. So what are we looking at today? First, we've got the Apple Watch Series.6 that's been out for a while now on the left. Here. We've also got the brand new Garmin venue, 2 that just launched a couple of weeks ago on the right here, if you're interested in a full, in-depth review of the Garmin venue 2 by itself I'll link that up here. So you can check that out.

But in this video we're going to be kind of looking at these two from a high level and not getting too far into the weeds. I kind of want to just talk about which watch might be right for you in your particular situation when purchasing either an Apple Watch Series 6 or the venue 2. You do have your choice of two sizes and different colors. The Apple Watch Series 6 comes in this 44 millimeter size and also comes in a smaller 40 millimeter size. While the venue 2 comes in this 45 millimeter diameter or a 40 millimeter diameter called the venue 2s, both the Apple Watch Series 6 and the Garmin venue 2 weigh almost the exact same amount, we're looking at 46 grams on the Apple Watch, series, 6 and 48 grams on the venue 2.

And, of course both of these are waterproof and rated to 50 meters. So you can wear them in the shower. You can go swimming in the pool or even in the ocean with them. Just no diving in terms of options in colors and bands. I'd say the Apple Watch has a win here.

There's a lot of different colors and varieties you can choose from. You can even upgrade to a sapphire glass screen and a stainless steel bezel. However, the Apple Watch Series 6 does get quite expensive if you opt to upgrade to those more premium models to a point that may not be worth it. The Apple Watch Series 6 also has the ability to be a LTE model. If you want to upgrade to that, that means you can make phone calls and send text messages without needing your phone on you, you can even stream music directly from the watch without needing your phone near you, which is pretty cool again.

It does get quite expensive if you upgrade to the LTE models, and you have to sign up for a monthly subscription from Verizon or whatever to make that work. There is no LTE version of the venue 2. Yet, however, it would be cool to see that in the future. The first thing you'll, probably notice when you fire up either of these watches, is how beautiful the displays are. Both of these watches feature an OLED or an ammo LED display.

That is super bright and punchy. I think the Apple Watch Series 6 does have a slight advantage in terms of display. It does get a little brighter, and it is a little larger at 1.78 inches versus the 1.3 inch display on the venue 2. That extra size is because it's a rectangular watch and that measurement is ticking at a diagonal and not vertically. The venue 2's display is quite nice, though, and I really have no complaints over either one they're, both very functional and even in direct sunlight.

You can read both of them pretty easily. Both the Apple Watch Series 6 and the venue 2 do feature an always on mode, so the watch will never turn off, so the screen will never black out. That can be handy if you want to read the time at a glance or if the text message rolls in they're, both very responsive in terms of their gesture. When you raise your wrist to turn on the display, they're. Very quick, there's really no delay at all in terms of the glass durability.

Between these two watches, Garmin uses corning gorilla glass, where apple uses its own proprietary glass called ion x. I've been really impressed with the ion x class, and it's kind of surprising, because there's no protection on an Apple Watch. There's no bezel like lip around it to protect it. If you put it face down or bump it against something where something like the venue.2 has a stainless steel bezel around it. That does provide some protection to the glass.

The gorilla glass on the venue 2 is no slouch either. However, in other models of garments, I've had I have been able to scratch the glass pretty easily. So it's something I'm pretty careful with both the Garmin venue, 2 and the Apple Watch Series.6 have the ability to swap out the bands really easily apple has its own system, where you push a little button, and you can slide the band off and on the Garmin. You've got a quick release system which you can find pretty easily on Amazon or even direct from Garmin when it comes to chargers with the Garmin venue, 2 and the Apple Watch, you've got two different systems: Garmin has its own proprietary charger. It's basically just an USB cable, with a four pin connector on one side and that plugs directly into the back of the watch.

Just like that really easy. While the Apple Watch is actually a wireless charger, it's not QI enabled. So you can't plop this down on just any wireless charger. It has to be this actual Apple Watch charger, which is kind of frustrating. I always I wish all these manufacturers would just go to a QI, wireless charger and get rid of their charging ports.

That would make life a lot easier and the most obvious thing between these two watches is their respective heart rate. Sensors. On the back here, we've got the Garmin elevate, 4.0 heart rate sensor on the venue 2, which is a brand-new design, and then we've got the Apple Watch Series 6 heart rate sensor on the left. Here both of these sensors do offer blood oxygen, saturation testing, and heart rate monitoring in terms of heart rate accuracy between the Apple Watch Series 6 and the Garmin venue 2. I've done a bunch of testing on this.

I've been out on several runs on the treadmill on the trail and on the road wearing chest, heart rate straps, as well as arm heart rate straps and the Garmin venue, 2 and Apple Watch Series 6 for basis of comparison. Furthermore, I have to say both of this heart rate. Sensors are very good. They are nearly as good as a chest: heart rate strap or an arm heart rate, strap they're, both very good. However, in my testing so far, I will give a slight advantage to the Garmin venue 2 in terms of heart rate accuracy.

In some situations, the Apple Watch Series 6 just didn't respond as quickly as the Garmin venue 2, when my heart rate spiked up or dropped really fast. The Garmin venue 2 reacted quicker in some situations, that's not to say the Apple Watch Series 6 has a bad heart rate sensor. In fact, it's quite the opposite. It's one of the best that I've tested on this channel both of this heart rate, sensors, can also check your spo2 levels or your blood oxygen saturation levels and to test that I've also compared it to this fingertip heart rate sensor in spo2 sensor. That has proven to be pretty accurate.

So far, and I got to say both of these spo2 sensors on the venue 2 and the series 6 have been pretty accurate within about one percent of the fingertip sensor that I have here. The Apple Watch Series 6 does have one more trick up its sleeve in terms of heart rate sensing. It actually has an ECG sensor, built in that's an electrocardiogram, and it's designed to check the sinus rhythm of your heart rate. To make sure it's not irregular. Now Apple makes it very clear in the software that this is not a medical grade device, and it's something just to check for sanity, but it is pretty cool to have on board and there's even the ability in the Apple Watch health app to export a PDF file of the graph from the ECG to your doctor.

Okay, let's talk about connectivity between the app watch series 6 and the Garmin venue 2. Both these do offer Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and both compare to external sensors, like heart rate, sensors and things like that. However, the Apple Watch Series 6 only works with iPhone. You can't pair this to an android device. So if you're looking for an android, smartwatch, take this one off your list.

The Garmin venue to you does work with either iPhone or android and just as equal on either one in terms of the user interface between the Apple Watch Series 6 and the Garmin venue, 2 they're, quite different. The Apple Watch Series, 6 runs apple, watch's, Apple Watch OS, and it's just super responsive. It's basically like having a tiny iPhone on your wrist. You can see you know just swiping around everything. Just works really quickly and there's really no delay with anything.

The Apple Watch Series 6 comes pre-installed with a bunch of apps out of the box, and one in particular, is the wellness and activity tracking. This tracks, your steps, your standing time and your exercise throughout the day and then shows it on a graph over time and, of course, this syncs over to Apple Health, and it's present on your iPhone there's just a lot going on the Apple Watch that I can't really cover in this video, because there's basically unlimited functionality with the Apple Watch, you can go in the iOS store and install thousands of different applications for a variety of different things. Now the Garmin venue 2 takes a different approach here. It's primarily designed for activity and fitness tracking, and not so much all that other smartwatch stuff that the Apple Watch can do. You can see here right from the watch face.

I've got various health metrics on the front and, of course, the watch face of the Garmin venue.2 is fully customizable, just like the Apple Watch, and you can download a bunch more from the Garmin's connect IQ store, swiping down from the watch face of the Garmin venue.2 brings you into your widgets or your glances as they're calling them now. We've got my calendar widget here, which is showing that I need to give my ROG his heartworm pill. That's important! Then we've got notifications from my phone here and then at the bottom. We've got a weather widget. These widgets are fully customizable.

You can reorder them, you can add to them, you can remove from them, and you can download more from to connect IQ store, like I said before, in terms of everyday smartwatch functionality between the Garmin venue, 2 and the Apple Watch Series 6, there's a pretty big divide there. The Apple Watch Series 6 is really a smartwatch. First in a fitness watch second, so it's got a lot of really nice features on it. For day-to-day life, for instance, you can actually answer and make phone calls directly on the watch without taking your phone out of your pocket, has a microphone and a speaker on board, so you can talk right into it. You can also type on it to respond to text messages, and you can also use verbal dictation to respond to text messages as well.

It fully integrates with Apple's email application, so you can check your email on here and there's a bunch of other uses for it in day-to-day life. When it comes to the venue 2, it's not quite as flexible as the Apple Watch Series 6, you can read your text messages and your notifications from your phone. You do get calendar integration, so you know when it's someone's birthday or whatever, and it does have built-in music controls to change the volume and change through tracks on your phone for everyday life. In terms of like overall smartwatch features, I will give the win to the Apple Watch Series 6. It just has a lot more built into it and even more so that you can download from the Apple Store when it comes to playing music from the devices themselves without having your phone on them.

Both of these are capable of doing that. However, there's a pretty big difference between the two out of the box. The Apple Watch Series 6, has Apple Music and apple podcasts installed in both of these apps can download and store music and podcasts for listening without your phone now on the app watch series 6, there are some third-party applications that do allow downloading and store music on the device, but there's not a ton of them and, most importantly, Spotify, which is a big one out. There does not support offline storage on the Apple Watch. I don't know if that's a limitation of the Apple ecosystem or if Spotify just decided to do that, but it's a pretty big bummer when it comes to Garmin, though the Garmin venue 2 does support offline music from Spotify and a bunch of other services like Amazon, music.

I think Pandora, heart, radio and Deezer. So, at the end of the day, both of these do offline music. It just depends on which service you're using and which one's supported by which watch. So, let's talk about what these things are kind of designed for and that is activity tracking running biking. Whatever out of the box, the Garmin venue 2 comes pre-installed with 33 activity profiles.

You've got things like running indoor track treadmill. All the basics are here. You've also got some more unique ones like strength, training, high intensity, training, cardio, yoga, Pilates, elliptical, etc. There's a bunch of options on board when it comes to activity tracking on the Apple Watch Series, six, there's a lot of profiles built in there's, probably hundreds built in there's really something for everybody here: you've even got things like surfing, uh, step, training, squash, softball, so social dancing, which is interesting. However, once you're in an activity like running like I just started here, you can see that the Apple Watch Series 6 and the Garmin venue 2 take a different approach to how they display the data.

The Garmin venue 2 has a series of data pages you can swipe through, and you can also fully customize these. However, you want to include a ton of different information while on the Apple Watch Series 6 there's only a few data fields available on these pages, they do cover all the bases, and you can customize these on the iOS app. However, there's just not a lot of data to choose from, I also for whatever reason, don't like the fact that I have to swipe over and hit end to stop my activity. If much prefer clicking the button. I don't know why it just feels like a more safe thing to do so out of the box.

Neither the venue, 2 nor Apple Watch Series, 6, support, multi-sport or triathlon mode. However, like I said before, the iOS App Store has something for everybody, including triathletes. You can download different applications to track your swim bike run on the Apple Watch without an issue, or it's just not really possible. On the venue too, I haven't really looked on to connect IQ store. There might be something out there to do triathlon mode on the venue too, in terms of overall usability during an activity when you're out on that run or bike ride.

I do prefer the usability of the Garmin vine 2 over the Apple Watch Series 6, just in terms of like swiping through the screens and seeing what I want to see on the fly is just a little easier to achieve on the Garmin venue 2 than on the series 6. I probably sound like a broken record, but again you can download other activity apps on the Apple Watch Series 6 and one of my personal favorites is called work outdoors. The workout doors app on the Apple Watch Series 6 actually gives you full mapping capabilities. It's got a variety of different data pages. You can swipe through it's a really powerful application for the Apple Watch Series 6.

With that work outdoors app. It brings it a lot closer in line to the Garmin venue 2 and even gives you some navigation features that you just don't have on the venue 2. So again, there's kind of an app for everything at this point. In terms of overall wellness tracking between the Garmin venue 2 and the Apple Watch Series 6 both of these will track your general wellness. Throughout the day, both the Garmin venue, 2 and Apple Watch Series 6 do support sleep tracking as well.

However, the Garmin venue 2 does give you a bunch more information that is lacking on the Apple Watch Series 6. The app watch is pretty basic when it comes to sleep tracking, it basically just tracks overall duration of sleep, no, like details included in that sleep where the Garmin venue 2 breaks down your sleep into rem, sleep, deep, sleep, awake time, interruptions all that stuff are logged throughout the night and then displayed in a really nice graph the next morning. So I'm going to give the win to wellness tracking and sleep tracking to the venue. Two in this department just does a little of a better job, and the date is just a little easier to go through in the app when it comes to the smartphone app between the Garmin ecosystem and the Apple Watch ecosystem. Again, they're pretty different, like I said, because the Apple Watch is so intertwined with the iOS ecosystem.

It's basically tied into all aspects of the iPhone, but if you want to get a look at your activity and fitness, there is a dedicated activity app you can go into. You can see your calories up here. You've got your calorie graph, your exercise, time standing time and then five flights of stairs climbed and any workout. For that day, Apple does have fitness plus integration, which is actually a subscription plan for workouts. It's pretty cool.

I have tried it on the trial period, and it's pretty cool for people who work out indoors at their house. You've also got the Apple Health app here, which shows your activity, your sleep from the night before your steps for the day and all of your other health data when it comes to the Garmin venue 2 and its smartphone app you're, going to be dealing with Garmin connect, which is the same app that they use for all the Garmin devices from the dashboard or home screen of the Garmin connect. App you've got a breakdown of summary of your day. You've got information for your heart rate, your body battery, your stress, tracking steps, floors, climb, calories, burned, sleep and all that other stuff. You've also got a summary of your previous day and then a trend of your past seven days, and then you've got a calendar to show all of your previous days and activities uh.

Furthermore, you can go back in time as far as you want you can. Furthermore, you know, go into a particular day. Like I look at April 8th here, you can see my running for the day. My sleep for that day, heart rate body battery stress all this is broken down in great detail even going back in time, and of course you can dive into your activity history here. So I can click on running, and I can see all of my running from the past seven days, four weeks or one year on a graph, I'm not going to dive into detail on either of these apps because there's a lot to go through with each of them.

I will say that if you're, primarily a sports or fitness based person, you might find more value in the Garmin connect ecosystem than you will with the Apple Watch ecosystem. It's just a little more intently, designed for fitness and activity tracking than it is on the Apple Watch ecosystem. That's just my opinion. I just like the usability overall. It's a lot simpler to dig through stuff on the Garmin ecosystem than it is the Apple Watch ecosystem.

Okay, let's talk about the big one. This may be a deciding factor between choosing one watch or the other. That's going to be battery life, so the Apple Watch out of the box, if you just take it out of the box, put it on your wrist, you don't go running using the GPS or any of that other stuff. You'll get about 18 hours of usability on the Apple Watch Series 6.18 hours, that is a daily charge. That's basically like having a cell phone.

The Garmin venue 2, however, will last up to 11 days out of the box, which is quite a bit more than 18 hours, and then, when we talk about tracking activities like GPS activities, running or biking you'll, get about seven hours on the Apple Watch Series: six, where you get about 22 hours on the Garmin venue, 2. Pretty big advantage to the Garmin venue 2. Here. It's also important to note. It depends how you're actually using these watches on how much battery life you're going to get out of them because they have these bright, vibrant displays.

If you have the brightness jacked up, and you have that always on mode turned on, and you're playing music from the watch. You're going to get quite a bit less battery life than if you didn't have all that stuff turned on, so overall in terms of battery life, the Garmin venue, 2, is definitely the winner. It just totally stomps the Apple Watch Series 6 to the ground. There's really no comparison here. It lasts way longer.

Another important detail, that's not totally obvious out of the box with the Apple Watch Series 6. Is that when you go on a run or a ride using the GPS connection on the watch, it actually defaults to using your phone's GPS antenna rather than the watches GPS antenna. This is by design because they're trying to save the battery life of the watch by using your phone's GPS connection to get around this, you actually have to turn off the Bluetooth on your watch, so to make sure it doesn't connect with your phone while you're out on an activity so yeah it's a little confusing. That's just something to keep in mind while you're, using that GPS mode on the Apple Watch Series 6. Of course the venue 2 doesn't have this issue.

It is always going to be using the internal antenna on the watch and not your phone, and again you can download third party applications like eye smooth run is a great running application where it does actually let you select if you want to use internal or external GPS on the Apple Watch. Okay, let's talk about accuracy in terms of GPS accuracy between the Apple Watch Series 6 and the Garmin venue 2. I thought they were both pretty good. I don't really have a complaint with either one, and they were both in line with a lot of my other test devices. Like my Garmin 945 and 745.

, I found no big surprises between the Garmin venue, 2 and Apple Watch. Series 6. Both are totally acceptable and they both reported almost the exact same distance. At the end of all of my runs. Okay, let's talk about price and value.

The Garmin venue 2 just launched at 399 dollars in the Apple Watch Series 6 has been around for a while, and it's also 399. However, recently I have seen the Apple Watch Series 6 drop as low as 349 on sale. So keep that in mind while you're shopping around and, of course I'll have links down below if you want to check either of these out. That brings me to the final topic, which one is right for you. That's a really tough question to answer, because they both do certain things really well and they kind of lack in other departments.

The Apple Watch Series 6 is a great day-to-day watch. It does everything you can answer phone calls on. It ties into everything on the iPhone really tightly. Furthermore, it's a great watch for daily life, it's also very functional in a sports and fitness capacity with offline music, GPS tracking and altimeter built in all that stuff. The Garmin venue 2, is no slouch in the smartwatch department, either reading text messages or emails on it is a breeze.

It does calendar integration, and it also has offline music. At the end of the day, though, the thing that drives me, nuts, with the Apple Watch Series 6, is the fact I have to charge it every day, and that might just be me because I'm used to watches that can last for you know a week or two on a single charge where the Garmin venue 2 really strikes a nice balance of having a great display, but also pretty awesome battery life as well. So I'll leave you with this. If you're looking for like a general smartwatch just have for day to day life and tracking your fitness, and you own an iPhone, I still think the Apple Watch Series 6 is really awesome. However, if you're more focused on fitness and activity and wellness tracking and all that stuff, the Garmin venue 2 does have a lot more options and features that might help you out.

So there's really not a loser here. It just kind of depends. What your use case is, I think for me. I would reach for the Garmin venue 2 over the series 6, but you might be different and if you are, let me know in the comments down below what would make you buy one or the other. Okay, I think that's all I've got for today.

That was a hard one for me to wrap my head around thanks for joining me on this journey. I just really just kind of talked through that on the fly, without even scripting it out, it's probably an awful video huh. If you enjoyed this video, you find it helpful. It gave you some sort of joy in your life. Please hit the thumbs up and consider subscribing down below.

So you don't miss more videos from me in the future and again, if you're planning on picking one of these up I'll have them linked in the description down below, helps out my channel. That's all I've got for today. I think I'll see you next time.

Source : Chase the Summit