Garmin Venu X1 Hands-On: Everything You Need to Know!

0:00 This is the brand new Garmin Venue X1. Garmin's thinnest watch to date, as well as their biggest screen today, a 2in display. But more importantly than that, it's a watch that aims to take something like their 4970 or Fenix 8 series and blend it with their existing Venue series, producing something that seems to target consumers of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 series, but a lot thinner and with far more sports focused features as compared to Apple's more smartwatch focused features. In this video, I'm going to dive into what is new on this watch and how it kind of fits in the large scheme of things because this is the first time we've seen a watch like this from Garmin. Sure, they have designed a square watches in the past. In fact, the original Venue series comes from the Vivo Active series that was announced all the way back in 2015, also Garmin's previously thinnest watch today

0:46 at 8 mm. In fact, fun history, that watch came out a few weeks before the Apple Watch 1 was announced. Oh, hey, just a quick note. If you're finding this video interesting and useful, just simply watch it all the way through. That is the only thing the YouTube gods care about. It really does help with this video and the channel quite a bit. Now, let's get straight into the tech goodness here. The very first thing is notable about this watch is it has a flashlight. If I just simply hold the bottom right button on, you can see the flashlight. And it has four different levels of white and then one level of red. The exact same as Garmin's other topend 4Runner and Phoenix watches. Next up, you've got this 2in monster of a display. Now, side by side with something like the Apple Watch Ultra, it is clearly bigger. It's bigger on paper, but it just feels a heck of a lot bigger side by side. I haven't decided whether or not I like yet the fact that it's so big on my wrist. But because it is so

1:32 unbelievably thin, 8 mm compared to the 12.5 mm of the previous Venue 3. Or if we compare it to the Apple Watch Ultra 2, you could pretty much fit two of these things inside the belly of that watch. It is absolutely incredibly thin. Next, it does come with this nylon band. It is the default option. I really like it. It's a nice band here. Now, of course, with every fabric band, you do have the fact that, you know, if you put it in the water over there, um go for a swim, shower, etc., it will be wet and when you then put it on your clothes, it's going to be wet as well. So, just keep that in mind. Uh but this is a nice and got velcro there and you can adjust it. And of course, it does have a stock basically band attachment mechanism there. So, you can swap this out if you wanted to. Next up is the battery. The battery is definitely less than a Venue 3 and that's for two reasons. One, it's just crazy thin, so obviously less space

2:19 for a battery. Uh, but two, it has a brighter display, substantially brighter display than the Venue 3. Garmin doesn't release nit values in their watches. I'm going to guess this is at least a 2000 nit display, if more than that, keeping in mind that that's just your peak brightness and what, you know, actual brightness level you're going to use throughout the day is going to vary based on all sorts of other factors. Meanwhile, on the back there is the Gen 5 optical heart rate sensor like you would expect from Garmin, except one little catch. At launch here, ECG isn't enabled on it. Not only is it not enabled today, but it's not going to be enabled in the future because the hardware is not present according to Garmin. That is a massive gap and something I just cannot wrap my head around given a price point to this watch compared to all the rest of their units. Now, that said, this watch has a ton of software as of today. Let's start off probably the biggest feature from a

3:04 software standpoint is the fact that this thing is essentially like a blend between a 49er 970 and a Fenix 8 and a Venue 3 altogether. There are pieces that it has from the Fenix 8 that the 4970 doesn't have. And then inversely, there are features that line more closely to the 4970. For example, the waterproofing spec being 50 m as opposed to the Fenix 8 100 m. Now, starting off with probably the biggest ticket item on the software side of things is the fact that has full offline mapping. The same topoactive maps that you would find on a Fenix 8. And that's notable because if you look at their landscape of competitors out there, some of their competitors do have offline mapping where it has a base map and shows you, you know, rivers and trails and stuff like that. Uh, but it will not be routable. This is 100% fully routable. In fact, you can do roundtrip routes on there. You can tap a point off, you

3:50 know, 50 km away and it'll route you to that point. Uh, whether it be riding or running or whatever the case is. You can also load in courses. I did that this morning on my run. I pulled in the course and I just simply follow the course. It gives you audible turnbyturn notifications uh either in Bluetooth headphones or in my case without Bluetooth headphones. It just did it uh basically from the watch itself using the speaker. It does have a speaker or mic in it like you expect in the Venue series. And they've added some of the Fenix 8 features around that speaker and mic. For example, voice command. So the ability to basically say, "Hey Garmin, open up the running app or show me my heart rate or whatever it may be." And they've also added voice notes. So you can simply take little notes on this as you're out for a run. uh you have a great idea, you want to record it and then retrieve that back later on. Now, another key navigation feature that it has from the higherend watches is Climb Pro. Climb Pro means that it'll go ahead

4:37 and figure out all of your sense and desens uh for hiking and whatnot, and you'll be able to see those on the watch in real time. So, you can see exactly where you are and also the upcoming climbs as well. It is incredibly handy in the mountains, especially for the bigger climbs to know that you still have x amount of distance or elevation gain remaining for that climb before you can finally like eat a pack of gummy bears or something like that. Meanwhile, on the training side, it's got almost all the features that you would expect to find on the 4970 or the Fenix 8. So, you're going to see training readiness. Uh that's Garmin's umbrella set of technologies where it basically tells you how ready you are to train on a given day. It looks at your training load recently, looks at recovery, it looks at your sleep, looks at your stress, and then gives you a score. And that score will change throughout the day. So when you wake up in the morning, uh typically speaking, it'll be one value. If you go for a hard run, your

5:22 readiness to train will go down. If you just lounge around all day, your readiness to train number will go up dynamically throughout the day. Likewise, it also has training status. So this is where you'll see productive or unproductive or maintaining or whatever it may be. Training status is more about the coaching angle of it than whether or not you are ready to train. So, it's looking at are you doing the right type of training, the right kind of balance of load, you know, intervals, long runs, whatever it may be, uh that sort of thing. That's all in here as well. Same goes for adding endurance score and hill score. And again, a lot of these features coming from that Fenix lineup. Still, there are some interesting gaps there. If you compare it to the 400 970 that was just released here, it is missing some of the new running features. For example, the running tolerance feature, the impact load feature, running economy, all those things aren't here today. Whether or not they come in the future remains to be

6:08 seen. In fact, that's actually an interesting point. You know, one of the challenges with the Venue series in the past is that they suck at doing updates. Like, it's really, really simple. Uh, the Garmin Venue series rarely gets meaningful updates after launch. Look at a few things here and there, and Garmin's got a little bit better that in the last year or so with minor updates, but by and large, the Venue series stays the same. Versus the Phoenix and the 4Runner series, at least until they release the next major version, they add tons of new features every quarter. And it'll be really interesting to see with this watch here which of those two models they follow. I'm really hoping they adopt more of that Phoenix and 4Runner model as opposed to the old school venue just leave it alone to kind of die model. Anyways, it does have a ton of the new race planning features. So, the ability to load a race onto here. It's going to give you your predicted uh finish times. It's going to

6:55 give you uh your countdown to your race. It's going to have treading plan support. So, it can automatically basically get you to that race goal. That is all here. Again, some slight differences to the 4970. uh like for example the race prediction feature on this unit here on the X1 it'll go ahead and show you your estimated finish time for that future race as of today. But in the case of 4970 it predicts out in the future based on a training load and says hey in 6 months when that race is you'll actually be this speed uh in this pace versus the X1 as of today just simply shows you what you would do as of this moment today if you went out and ran. So again some minor differences there. Now you are going to find some of the more recent new features in the Garmin lineup on this watch. For example, Garmin share. That's the ability to have two Garmin watches together and send a course between them wirelessly. Uh if you're a trail head without any other connectivity at all, just simply two

7:41 watches next to each other. That's there. And then you're going to find a huge set of new sport profiles compared to the Venue 3. About 100 sport profiles in total. I'll type them up and list them all down here in the video description. Uh but there is a boatload of sport profiles. However, if you compare that to something like the Fenix 8, the key difference you're going to see from the sport profile standpoint comes with the waterproofing. So any sport profiles that might need deeper waterproofing. For example, there's no diving supported in this watch here or need high-speed waterproofing. Uh so think about scenarios where you're going really fast on the water and you may fall. Uh in those cases, you want the higher waterproofing spec. And so those sport profiles don't tend to be in this watch. A good example that would be water skiing. There's no water skiing in this watch, but there is open water swimming and there is kayaking and standup paddle boarding. So, low speed things, but not high-speed water skiing

8:28 where you're going to smack the water and and potentially damage the watch. Likewise, on the sport side of things, it has a slate of sport sensor type supported. So, AMP plus and Bluetooth sensors that are now supported. Here's a full list down there. It basically matches the Fenix 8 list. In fact, this is a great time to walk through the watch. I want to walk through the basics of it, the widgets and stuff like that, as well as the sport modes because there is a ton of changes in those sport modes. And I think it's easier just to simply go hands-on and kind of give you a quick tour of things. So, here is the watch as you've been seeing all along. But now we're just going to walk through the menu a little bit. Uh, so as I mentioned earlier on, flashlight long hold right there. You can see this menu on the side there to be go ahead and increase and decrease the brightness. Uh, and also down to their red light. And you just simply long hold again to turn it off. Now, swiping down, you get into the widget glances. So, these are all the customizable widget glances. You

9:14 can add different ones you want. You can customize, delete them, remove them, etc. I've already tweaked these a little bit. Uh you can see jet lag advisor because I' i'm on a trip right now and so it's uh slowly catching up but there's the training readiness that we looked at earlier on and you go down and see the different factors in there going on back and go into training status uh and again different kind of core components acute load essentially being how much training you've done the last 7 days or so V2 max etc. Then down from that, you've got your endurance score. You get your calendar, stocks, all these things are all fully customizable. Uh here is that race plan piece where I can basically see what's coming up in my training plan. This is all dynamically generated by putting in the race in the fall that I did there. So I got plan overview, see different phases for that plan based on this triathon that I stuck in there. Same goes for running or cycling events as well. Uh scrolling on

10:01 down here again, you can customize all these at the bottom. You can add them, remove them, you can add folders. Very similar what you've seen in the past on the Phoenix and 4Runner lineup. Uh, now backing out of this all the way back to the beginning here. Note there is just two buttons here. Not even three buttons like the Venue or of course five buttons like the 4Runner or uh Fenix series. I've gotten used to it, but I still like my buttons. I wish there was more buttons. Also notice that the screen turned off there. It's in gesturebased mode right now, but you can change that. that. So, if I were to go tap up here on the right hand side, go down into settings, and then go down to display and brightness, we'll toggle on that always on display, and now it'll simply dim uh as opposed to turning off entirely. Now, of course, with the always on display, you're going to have less battery life. So, you're going to have about two days of battery life as opposed to the four to 5 days of battery life. And there is that dim display

10:47 there. You can still see the time. And when I would raise my wrist up, it would go to full brightness. Again, tapping this upper right hand button for a second, this is where you have your activities and apps. So, these are the apps down here. Uh, we can tap open the map app and it'll find a location. There we go. Already found it. And I can zoom in if I want to as well like this. We go further and I can toggle on different map layers here. I can add in uh different map types. For example, I could bring in outdoor plus maps, so actual like satellite mapping, etc. Lots and lots of different options like you'd find in a Phoenix lineup. And all these settings are very similar to the Phoenix lineup as well, including that map radius option at the top. Uh going on back though, go down the rest of the apps that you see right there. So our voice apps. I can tap it and give it a command. Open running.

11:35 There we go. And now it starts to run. Personally, I don't find this all that useful, but I know some people might. You've got voice notes here to be able to create a voice notes, garment share. You can customize your watch face and so on. Now up the top, you've got all your sport modes. So these are all sport modes that I showed a little bit earlier on. But if we tap into the run side of things, just an example of one of those sport modes, you can see down below we've got training. This is where we do structure workouts. We can import workouts, create structure workouts. Um, all of that is located in here, including Strava Live segments or racing past efforts. Tapping back, you can open up the course navigation. Again, tons and tons of options in here. Uh, exploring nearby. So, right now, if I just tap this, it'll find the points of interest and things nearby. So, cafes and Tim Hortons and whatever else is nearby me right now. It'll pull all of those uh into there. Now, this does take

12:22 a while. It's not super fast. This is not like Google on your wrist. Uh but, you know, it's good enough. So, let me find a coffee and tea. And there we go. Tim Hortons 1 kilometer away. I'll be seeing you in a little bit. Uh now, going back here, back into the settings, navigation. This is where I would have loaded up my course like I showed earlier on. So, loading up this route right there. So, BAM and beyond. And you're going to see that map preview at the top. It's going to render that in a second. It is a topoactive map. So you can see the topographic uh nature of that. And I can tap down here in the bottom to do the course in reverse to load up route settings. Uh to look at the climbs like we saw earlier uh and of course also share that course with someone else. Now again going back here, back again. Back again. Uh we can look at run settings. This is where I can tweak all of my data pages and customizations there. So uh I can change

13:08 these data fields. I can go down further. I can add a new data page. And these are some of the stock pages running power, virtual partner, elevation, etc. Or I can make my own page with the custom data all the way up to go down the bottom should be eight data fields. So a lot of data fields that you can add there if you want. Again, backing out of here, uh you've got all the rest of your run settings. And this is pretty much the same on all the different sport profiles. So whether it be alerts, laps, etc. Obviously, certain sport profiles are going to have more features than others. For example, in cycling, you're going to have some of the cycling features like power guide, etc. But, uh, by and large, this is relatively similar. And of course, you can go ahead and broadcast your heart rate here on AMP Plus or Bluetooth Smart. And then in the running mode, you can turn on a flashlight uh to be, for example, after sunset. So, automatically

13:54 strobe this flashlight so people can see you around. It's kind of handy and something that's been on their other watches for quite a while. Uh, so going on back again here, uh, we're back into the watch settings. Uh, and this is where you can configure all of the watch settings, including the focus modes, which is something coming from that Phoenix and Forigner lineup that wasn't previously on Venue. Uh, and essentially allows you to go ahead and customize things for sleep or activity, and then everything from your display brightness. Tap this in. There we go. Uh, notifications, sounds, etc. Um, across the board. So, think of it just like focus modes on your phone, uh, but for those two categories there. And then finally, down at the bottom here, you've got, uh, music. You can load Spotify music on here and play it back. Uh, same goes for Amazon Music or YouTube Music. Um, as well as, of course, MP3s, too. Okay, so with that tour out of the way,

14:40 let's talk about price and kind of wrap things up. This is priced at $799 compared to $4.49 for the Venue 3. Now, at $799, it's obviously like almost twice as much as the original Venue 3 is, except it's hard to compare this to a Venue 3 because it has the features of a 4970 or a Fenix 8. And a 4970 is 750 bucks and a Fenix 8 is a thousand bucks. like those are much more expensive watches. It's got a full titanium case body which again the Foreigner 970 doesn't have that. It's got a plastic body on the back. Um and so it's obviously going to cost more money for these premium materials along with a sapphire glass display as well. Now at the same time there are also some weird choices made there as well when you compare it to the price. For example, there is no multiband or dual frequency GPS inside of this. That is

15:25 exceptionally unusual in Garmin's realm of higherend watches having that and even some of their, you know, medium tier watches like a 400 265 has that feature there. So, it's odd that it doesn't have it here. But I've also noted before that nobody does GPS accuracy better without multiband than Garmin in their latest chipsets. It is mind-bogglingly how good they are without multiband from an accuracy standpoint. Ely surpassing almost all of their competitors that have multiband GPS uh without it. So ultimately, I don't care how you get accurate GPS as long as it's accurate. So that's something I'll be digging into in the full in-depth review, as well as of course the optical heart rate sensor, making sure no corners are cut or things like that, and then ultimately figuring out where this fits up in the Garmin lineup, and I know where it fits on paper, but where it fits in my head and

16:11 in real life. So obviously, they've made a number of choices in the menus and the styling and the features and functionality as to where it fits between the Venue, the Forerunner, and the Phoenix lineup. It's again all kind of in the middle there. And I'm curious to see if all those choices and decisions actually make sense in real life as I put it through more testing and uh more just whacking the crap out of it. So stay tuned for that. Definitely hit subscribe at the bottom for plenty more sports tech goodness. With that, have a good