If you’re looking to upgrade your smartwatch and you’re trying to decide between the new Garmin Venu 4 and Apple Watch 11, you’ve come to the right place. Both watches are designed to be worn 24/7 and will track a lot more than just your steps.
If you’re new to the Garmin Venu line, it’s Garmin’s most popular smartwatch. The Venu 4 has had a design upgrade compared to its predecessor, the Garmin Venu 3 — it has a more premium design with an all-metal bezel, a brighter screen and some of Garmin’s most advanced health features.
The Apple Watch 11, on the other hand, is the best Apple Watch on the market for most people. It has a 24-hour battery life (for the first time), a tougher screen, and is essentially an extension of your iPhone on your wrist.
But which is best when it comes to counting steps? To find out more, I strapped both to my wrist and set out for a walk, while manually counting my steps. Read on to find out which was more accurate.
Garmin Venu 4 vs Apple Watch 11: I walked 10,000 steps with these two watches
For this test, I used my trusty $5 clicker tool from Amazon, and manually clicked each time I took a step. I wore both the Apple Watch 11 and Garmin Venu 4 on my left wrist, and held my clicker in my right hand. Both watches count your steps by using an internal accelerometer, which measures the swing of your arm.
Each swing counts for two steps. It doesn’t matter whether you wear your watch on your dominant or non-dominant hand, or whether you’re walking with your hands in your pockets, or holding something; the accelerometer should still measure your body’s movement.
As with all of the Apple watches, the Apple Watch 11 doesn’t tell you the number of steps you’ve taken during a specific workout; instead, you see an overall number of steps throughout the day.
You can see your overall steps for the entire day, but not how many steps you took on a particular walk (probably because steps aren’t actually that useful a metric, but annoying for me when writing these articles). For this comparison, I downloaded a third-party Pedometer+ app onto my Apple Watch 11.
I split my 10,000 steps into three different walks throughout the day. You can see my results here, as well as the total:
| Row 0 - Cell 0 | Manual | Garmin Venu 4 | Apple Watch 11 |
Walk one | 5,410 steps | 5,470 steps | 5,361 steps |
Walk two | 3,348 steps | 3,388 steps | 3,203 steps |
Walk three | 2,034 steps | 2,126 steps | 2,010 steps |
Total | 10,792 steps | 10,984 steps | 10,574 steps |
As you can see from the results, this one is pretty tight — the Apple Watch 11 undercounted by 218 steps, and the Garmin Venu 4 overcounted by 192 steps. That’s a difference of 26 steps, which is relatively minor when considering a 10,000-step walk.
This means we can conclude both watches are pretty spot on when it comes to counting your steps. The average person takes 2,000 steps in a mile, so missing or overcounting by 200 steps isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things.
To really compare these two watches, you’d have to do more testing and look at a lot more than just steps. Both watches are packed with sensors and trackers to help you live a healthier life. Both have HRM, ECG, SpO2 and Skin Temperature sensors.
Both have multiple sports modes, as well as sleep tracking features. I’d say the Garmin Venu 4 is more advanced than the Apple Watch when it comes to tracking your training; however, the Apple Watch 11 is streets ahead in terms of smartwatch capabilities.
Both also have very similar bright displays, although the Garmin Venu 4’s is circular — which you prefer will be a personal preference. That said, if you are considering the two, the battery life of the Venu 4 is better than the Apple Watch 11 — with Garmin, we’re talking about 10 days of battery life in smartwatch mode, not 24 hours.
We’ll continue testing the two watches, but whichever you’re considering, rest assured that they’re counting your steps accurately, so unlike me, you don’t have to.
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