Garmin Venu 3 vs Samsung Galaxy Watch 6: Garmin crushes Samsung in this one area

Garmin Venu 3 vs Samsung Galaxy Watch 6: Garmin crushes Samsung in this one area،

Do you have your attention now? Read on, because while Samsung has more experience making smartwatches, this Garmin crushes it in one key area.

The good news is that you have plenty of choice with these watches: firstly, both come in smaller and larger sizes. We generally recommend the smaller sizes for people who have a wrist less than 170mm, while if your wrist is larger, a larger size would probably be better.

The Garmin, on the other hand, has three physical buttons on the side.

Both the Garmin and Galaxy watches support swipes and taps, and both have the same 5 ATM water resistance and are swim-resistant.

Bands

Standard spring bands are supported on both, but Samsung also offers new one-click bands

Garmin Venu 3 vs Samsung Galaxy Watch 6: Garmin crushes Samsung in this area

As for the bracelets, you have different bracelet sizes for the different models.

Here’s a quick breakdown:

Garmin Venue 3 (45mm) uses 22mm spring bands
Garmin Venu 3S (41mm) uses 18mm spring bands
Galaxy Watch 6 and Watch 6 Classic (all models) use 20mm bands (either spring bar or new Samsung one-click bands)

By default, you get a sports band on the Garmin and Galaxy watches, but the Galaxy’s band is wider and bulkier, while the Garmin has a band that doesn’t extend as far across your wrist and is tighter .

However, you can easily move to another group if you don’t like the ones provided.

Software and Features

Garmin’s proprietary operating system seems much more basic than Wear OS 4 on the Galaxy

We said earlier that Garmin is known for its sports watches, not its smartwatches, and you can tell this best by looking at the interface. It seems a bit weird and many decisions make sense on watches with buttons, but not on smartwatches with a touchscreen.

THE Garmin Venue 3 The watch face selection isn’t nearly as good as the Galaxy’s, and the little complications you can easily exploit on the Galaxy Watch aren’t exploitable on the Garmin, limiting functionality. Many simple actions are unnecessarily complicated on the Garmin: you can’t swipe a notification, you have to press a small button once, then another button. Annoying, if you receive a lot of notifications and want to clear them quickly!

The reason for all these problems is the old proprietary Garmin operating system that is a thing of the past and trying to catch up with modern times with touchscreen watches.

THE Galaxy Watch 6 on the other hand, it runs on the latest Android Wear OS 4, and the navigation is more intuitive and the dials are more beautiful. And having this rotating bezel on the Classic model is simply brilliant!

Keep in mind, however, that a Galaxy Watch won’t work with an iPhone, whereas you can use a Garmin watch on both Android and iPhone.

Heart rate accuracy

When it comes to heart rate accuracy, the Garmin has a new Elevate Gen 5 sensor that brings improvements with more green LED lights and new orange lights, as well as a large sensor area to better track your cardiac frequency.

The Samsung Galaxy, on the other hand, definitely has issues with heart rate accuracy. During an easy street workout doing pull-ups and dips, my heart rate was detected to be much higher than it actually was on the Galaxy Watch. For more intense activities, it’s hard to place too much emphasis on the Galaxy Watch’s readings, but for slower, more casual activities, it does a good job.

Garmin also supports ECG, but while this feature is already available on the Galaxy, the Garmin will get it soon via a software update.

Other metrics such as SpO2 oxygen saturation are available on both watches, but another key metric – HRV (heart rate variability) – is not available on the Galaxy, while Garmin has it.

Sleep Tracking Accuracy

When it comes to sleep tracking, the Garmin and Galaxy can tell you when you fell asleep, when you woke up, and also tell you how much time you spend in each stage of sleep: deep sleep, light sleep, and paradoxical sleep. .

However, we were disappointed to find that the sleep stage reports, especially for REM sleep time on the Galaxy, were completely irrelevant! This is despite Samsung claiming huge improvements in sleep tracking as one of the best features of this watch! The problem appears to be software-related, as users of older Galaxy Watches are also receiving broken data, but Samsung seems to simply turn a blind eye to the problem over the past few months. And the problem lies in a detected paradoxical sleep time that is simply too low! On nights when other gadgets showed me I had 40 minutes or even an hour of REM sleep, the Galaxy Watch only showed 15 minutes or less.

We hope Samsung fixes this issue very soon.

In its current state, the Garmin Venue 3 is a much better sleep tracker.

GPS accuracy

Both watches come with single-band L1 GPS, which is to be expected at this price point.

But the accuracy is actually very good on the Garmin, and most of the time it was spot on with trails, providing accurate measurements for your runs and bike rides.

The accuracy of GPS on the Galaxy Watch 6 is nowhere near as good, and it often goes sideways or veers when you stop in the same spot, and the overall GPS readings come with a lot of noise and aren’t on par with the best smartwatches on the market.

Battery and charging

Garmin crushes the Galaxy!

The biggest disappointment with modern smartwatches is their all-day battery life, and the Galaxy Watch 6 is no exception. This requires recharging every day.

If you don’t like it, you’ll love it Garmin Venue 3! On the smallest Garmin Venu 3S model I tested, battery life is about five days with one workout per day and the always-on display enabled, and on the larger Venu 3, you could reach almost a week. Talk about great battery life!

As for charging, you get Garmin’s standard charging cable with the proprietary connection, while the Galaxy uses a magnetic charging puck, which is a bit more convenient to use.

You should be aware, however, that while the Galaxy may be available in a cellular model that can be used independently of your phone, the Garmin cannot.

Here are the prices of Garmin Venue 3 And Galaxy Watch 6:

Garmin Venue 3 / 3S location: $450
Galaxy Watch 6 40mm/44mm: $300/$330 (add $50 for LTE cellular connection)
Galaxy Watch 6 Classic 43mm/47mm: $400/$430 (add $50 for LTE)

Yes, the Garmin is the more expensive option and also keep in mind that Galaxy Watches are often sold at heavily discounted prices, so you can get them much cheaper if you wait for a good deal.

Voice and haptic calls

Both watches can take and receive calls, and when it comes to haptics, both offer a similarly poor experience. It’s nothing as crisp and precise as the vibration feedback from an Apple Watch, for example.

Specifications

Specifications	Garmin Venue 3	Samsung Galaxy Watch 6
Models (Size, Weight, Price)	Venu 3: 45 mm, 1.4 inch screen, weight 30 g Venu 3S: 41 mm, 1.2 inch screen, 27 g 12mm thick on both	40mm (38.8 x 40.4 x 9.0mm) 44mm (42.8 x 44.4 x 9.0mm) Weight 28.7g for 40mm Weight 33.3g for 44mm
Materials	Metal bezel, plastic body	Aluminum body Sapphire caseback
CPU, RAM, storage	Unknown – 8 GB of storage	Samsung Exynos W930 2 GB of RAM 16 GB of storage
Software	Garmin proprietary operating system	PorterOS 4
Battery and charging	14 days in connected watch mode – Venu 3 10 days in connected watch mode – Venu 3S Garmin proprietary cable	40mm 300mAh 44mm 425mAh
Sensors	Garmin Elevate V5 (Gen5): optical heart rate ECG Single-band GPS	Samsung BioActive: optical heart rate ECG Single-band GPS

Summary

Here’s what it all boils down to: the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 is better in terms of smartwatch features, the interface is more intuitive, managing notifications is a bit easier, and it’s nice to have a version cellular, and all these things. come in a watch that is not too expensive. Unfortunately, if you want good accuracy from heart rate tracking and GPS, the Galaxy Watch isn’t there yet, and sleep tracking is also surprisingly compromised (considering all the marketing buzz surrounding it ).

THE Garmin Venue 3 might not have a super polished interface, but it’s better in most other areas and absolutely crushes the Galaxy in terms of battery life.

So… which one would you choose?