Garmin seems as though it’s in the midst of a major course correction, and 2025 is a pivotal year. As someone who’s been reviewing fitness technology, including the best Garmin watches, for many years, there’s certainly been an increase in dramatic shifts in direction for the company in the past few months.
That’s not to say ‘change’ means ‘bad’: the recently announced Garmin Venu X1 looks like a great watch, but it’s a pivot from the way Garmin has been designing watches up until this point.
At two inches, the Venu X1 features Garmin’s biggest screen. The Venu series has always represented Garmin’s foray into lifestyle watch territory, with AMOLED screens replacing the duller, battery-saving memory-in-pixel (MIP) ones used in many of Garmin’s other series and offering communication features, such as the ability to take calls on-wrist and interface with smart devices like the best video doorbells. Essentially, the Venu series was Garmin’s answer to the best Apple Watches.
The Garmin Venu X1 is Garmin’s Apple Watch Ultra in every way. A square shape instead of Garmin’s usual round face and no longer chunky to incorporate bigger batteries, the Venu X1 is described as ‘ultrathin’, and packs a reduced maximum of eight days of battery life.
It’s still leagues more life than you get out of your standard Apple Watch, but that powerful AMOLED screen, coupled with other features like an LED torch, means you’ll get much less than the Garmin Venu 3, which used to offer up to 14 days.
Venu X1 eschews the way old watches used to be made for the company’s truest smartwatch-esque design yet.
All other watches, such as Garmin’s Forerunner, Instinct, and Fenix ranges, which used to be released with power-saving MIP screens, are now being released as power-sucking AMOLED ones. Where MIP options do exist, they’re packing Garmin’s Power Glass solar battery-extending technology, because this can’t yet be implemented on a watch with an AMOLED screen. I have no doubt that once Garmin cracks Power Glass for AMOLED, we’ll never see a MIP option again.
Battery lives are getting shorter, screens are getting brighter, and feature lists are getting longer, as Garmin positions itself further alongside Apple and Samsung and further away from its best running watch contemporaries, Polar and Coros. Apple is the biggest seller of smartwatches by a huge margin, so it’s clear there’s a market there, and one Garmin probably believes is worth pivoting to tap into.
On the fitness side, the introduction of a premium tier aligns more closely with Garmin’s competitors, such as Fitbit and Google, and some of the best fitness apps like Strava and AllTrails.
Garmin has been one of the few holdouts for a long time as its competitors offered premium subscription services – even Apple has Apple Fitness Plus – and fans appreciated the company’s stubbornness. However, it finally buckled in March, seeing the revenue streams it was leaving on the table and arriving with the controversial Garmin Connect Plus.
Garmin fans can feel it in the air: their brand of choice is undergoing a change of direction, a sort of metamorphosis. The next six months will tell us more about that change and what the next few years of Garmin will look like.
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matt.evans@futurenet.com (Matt Evans)
