(NEW) Garmin Venu 3S Smart Watch (Open Box)

There are so many things wrong with this watch it's hard to begin. First off I was trying really hard to get past all the problems and try to get used to the watch. My last watch was a fossil 4 and it was amazing. The only downside to that watch which was a huge downside was the battery couldn't last a full day when using the watch functionality regularly. Unfortunately, Fossil has stopped making their smartwatches and have gone a different direction so now I'm left with trying to find another brand that is as good and has a better battery. I thought I found something better when I found Garmin's venu series. I was sorely mistaken. Let's start with the only two positives I have about this watch: Physical aesthetics and battery life. I bought the 41 mm diameter version of this watch and it feels and looks amazing. It's extremely light and the face and back of it have the dimensions of a small and unobtrusive as well as elegant looking watch. Battery life, I haven't had a chance to test just because I was disgusted by the watch after the first 30 minutes of trying to get it set up. On paper, the battery life looks amazing so I'm just going to give Garmin the benefit of the doubt and say that, yes, it will probably last a full 10 days. All right, now to the laundry list of garbage associated with this watch that makes it completely unusable. 1. This watch is incapable of connecting to my Wi-Fi router. I'm pretty good at setting up devices on my router. I can set them up with automatic settings or manual settings pretty easily. Anything that has the ability to connect to a modern router I've been able to connect to my router. So far I've had several failed attempts at connecting to my Wi-Fi from this watch. I've attempted to make the connection from the watch itself as well as from the Garmin app. I've restarted the watch and attempted these connections again. I've also attempted doing the connection manually on the watch by setting the security type of my network as well. I know the SSID and password for my network like the back of my hand so the chance of user error trying to set this up is zero. This reason alone is enough to return the watch. Without Wi-Fi access there's no way to configure apps, there's no way to install apps, there's no way to sync up data to my phone, basically you can't use the watch for anything other than checking the time. If that's all I wanted then I would have gotten a cheapo $20 piece of garbage at the store that only tells time. 2. The UI is nowhere near as good as WearOS 3.0. Garmin touts their watch as a device for active people who are outside a lot and want to track their location, distance, calories and everything else associated with being active. To do this, they decided to build their own operating system/app instead of piggybacking off of what Google made. That was a big mistake because there UI and UX designers are absolutely incompetent at building a user experience that is intuitive and easy to use. The way you have to swipe around to get to different screens is not as intuitive as WearOS. All of the swiping is mostly vertical and really only gives you exercise and activity screens. You can swipe right to give you a custom screen which could either be a music app or a couple of other different options. That's it. That's all you get. For $450 that is pathetic. Furthermore the physical sliding of your finger across the screen has to be perfectly done from the outer edge of the screen to make a swipe register. My Fossil watch would let you start your swipe from anywhere on the screen and as long as you swiped in a particular direction that it recognized (Left, right, up, down) it would do as you asked. I would love to have reviewed the rest of the watch such as the activity functionality as I was using it, The GPS accuracy, the battery life, and everything else associated with using The everloving atrocity that is the Venu 3S, but alas, Garmin made it impossible to actually use their watch. I wonder if this was a ploy by the engineering team to sabotage the company. It sure feels like it.