The Coros Vertix 2S is a small-but-meaningful upgrade on the Vertix 2, notably improving the accuracy of the GPS tracking. It’s one of the best sports watches you can get and despite the high price, it’s reasonable value for those who want a rugged titanium watch with long battery life.

However, it is still outclassed by the best Garmin watches, like the Garmin Fenix 7 or Garmin Enduro 2, which offer better navigation and smart features, while matching or outdoing the sports tracking and training analysis on the Vertix 2S. There are also AMOLED sports watches I prefer like the Garmin Epix Pro and Suunto Race.

Coros Vertix 2S: Price And Availability

The Coros Vertix 2S launched on April 25, 2024 and costs $699 in the US and £599 in the UK, the same price as the Coros Vertix 2. It’s far from cheap, but equivalent watches with titanium bezels and sapphire screens—like the Polar Grit X2 Pro, Suunto Vertical and Garmin Fenix 7 Pro—are all more expensive (if you choose the titanium models of each).

How I Tested This Watch

I used the Vertix 2S for two weeks prior to its launch, and will continue to use it until I’m able to drain the battery entirely. I have run more than 60 miles with the watch, as well as tracking other activities like yoga and strength sessions. I’ve tested the rest of the watches in Coros’s range and the Coros Vertix and Vertix 2, as well as the best sports watches from other brands.

Design And Hardware

The Vertix 2S is a large watch, with a 50.3mm case that’s 17.6mm thick. It’s light for its size though, with the case weighing 61g, which rises to 70g with a nylon band and 87g with a silicone band—both bands are included with the watch, and you can also use other 26mm straps with it.

There are three colors available—black, gray and blue—and all have a titanium bezel and back case, with plastic used for the rest of the case. The 1.4in memory-in-pixel touchscreen is made from sapphire glass. There are three buttons on the watch, with the middle one also being a dial. 

The Vertix 2S has a 10 ATM waterproof rating and will work in a temperature range of -22°F (-30°C) to 122°F (50°C), according to Coros. The materials used, and the durability of the watch, are a selling point because you have to pay more to get equivalent materials from other brands. However, the screen is duller than others, including other LCD watches like the Fenix 7, and it’s less bright than the AMOLED display you get on the likes of the Garmin Epix Pro and Polar Grit X2 Pro. It’s clear enough to read outdoors, but a bit dull inside and I often had to turn on the backlight to read it throughout the day.

The Vertix 2S has a new optical heart rate sensor that promises more accuracy than the sensor on the Vertix 2, but reduces the battery life of the watch. In fairness, the Vertix 2S has battery life to play with: the 2S will still last up to 46 days in watch mode and offers 118 hours of GPS tracking. As with the Vertix 2, the Vertix 2S offers dual-band GPS tracking, though Coros has redesigned the antennae to improve the accuracy. The Vertix 2S has a barometric altimeter and compass, and can measure blood oxygen saturation and heart rate variability. You can connect external sensors via Bluetooth, but not ANT+.

HR And GPS Accuracy

The Vertix 2 was the first sports watch I’d tested that offered dual-band GPS tracking, but it wasn’t as big an upgrade in accuracy as I’d hoped. Since then many brands have launched watches with dual-band GPS, and Garmin and Suunto’s watches were more accurate than the Coros watches with dual-band in particular.

Coros seemed to fix this with the Coros Pace 3, which is accurate, while the redesigned antennae on the Vertix 2S have improved the accuracy compared with the Vertix 2. On all my runs I compared the Vertix 2S to the Garmin Epix Pro and it matched up closely and there were few, if any, errors on the GPS traces I looked at after runs.

Unfortunately, the picture isn't as rosy with regards to the Vertix 2’s heart rate tracking. This is often a weakness with sports watches, but given that Coros sacrificed battery life to put in a new optical sensor to improve HR accuracy I expected better.

On almost all my runs the Vertix 2S has been inaccurate when compared to a chest strap, usually reading way too high, and if you’re planning on using its training analysis or using heart rate to guide your training, I would pair a chest strap to the watch.

Battery life

Coros watches are renowned for their long battery life, and the Vertix 2S is no exception. It will last up to 46 days in watch mode, though this drops to 36 days if you use the sleep tracking on the watch, and offers up to 118 hours of standard GPS tracking, or 43 hours of dual-band GPS tracking. All these numbers are comparable with the longest-lasting watches out there, like the Garmin Enduro 2 and Suunto Vertical, though the Vertix 2S offers less battery than the Vertix 2 because of the new HR sensor.

There are a couple of negative reasons Coros battery life is so good that are worth noting. One is the dull screen compared with other watches, and the other is that the watch only takes HR readings every 10 minutes rather than continuously when you’re not exercising. You can change this setting, though, and I think taking readings every 10 minutes is a good option to have as I’d rather have good battery life over 24/7 HR stats.

After 10 days of use, including eight runs using dual-band GPS and sleep tracking each night I was down to 60% battery. Even for those training heavily you can expect two to four weeks of battery life, with the main determining factor being how much time you spend training using GPS—in between workouts the battery barely drops on the Vertix 2. The battery life is as good as, or better than, what I got from the Garmin Enduro 2 and Suunto Vertical. The only watch that consistently outlasts the Vertix 2S is in fact the Vertix 2.

Sports Tracking And Training Analysis

The Vertix 2S has a variety of sports modes, including triathlon and open-water swimming tracking, along with a dedicated track mode for runners. You can create a custom sports mode if one of your favorites isn’t listed by default. It’s also easy to create and follow structured workouts or training plans on the watch, and you can customize data screens to show up to eight stats at once.

It’s an easy and intuitive watch to use for sports tracking. Coros has upgraded the sports tracking across its watches with a software update. This includes screen mirroring so you can see the watch’s stats on your phone during a workout, as well as the navigation screen if you’re following a route. This update also added a virtual pacer for running workouts.

The Vertix 2S also feeds into Coros’s EvoLab training analysis platform, which gives you a rating of your running (and cycling) fitness, predicted race times and a breakdown of your recent training load. This is available across all Coros watches. I’ve always found EvoLab a pretty accurate and useful gauge of my current fitness and training load.

The sports tracking and training analysis on the Vertix 2S is up to par, though it doesn’t stand out, aside from extra features for outdoor climbing I’ve not been able to test. Coros offers the same array of features across its range, and on the best Garmin watches you get extras like a training readiness score, plus interesting ratings of your endurance and hill running ability.

Maps And Navigation

The Vertix 2S has color maps with turn-by-turn directions on routes and a back-to-start feature. It’s easy to create routes within the Coros app, or import them into it from other sources to load onto the watch. The maps are not as colorful and clear to read as those on Garmin, Polar and Suunto watches, especially those brands’ AMOLED watches, nor are they as detailed as Garmin’s, but it’s easy to navigate routes using them.

You can’t add the maps as a default data screen within an activity, which seems odd to me, but I set the maps to come up when I held down the light button on the watch. You can do this during a run or other activity to add the map to your screens without pausing or stopping your workout. This will show a breadcrumb trail of your route so far overlaid on the map, and you can also add a back-to-start pointer to any outdoor activity. When following a route you also get an elevation profile that shows the climbs and descents to come, plus details on the total distance and amount of uphill you have left. 

The navigation features on the Vertix 2S are good and on a par with Polar and Suunto’s, but Garmin still reigns supreme here. Its watches have “routable” maps that know where you are so you can create or adjust routes on the fly, whereas the Coros routes are overlaid on a map, so if you go wrong you are just told you’re off course. Garmin also has the excellent ClimbPro tool that shows each climb and descent on your route individually to help you judge your effort on long uphills in particular.

Smart Features

The Vertix 2S shows your phone notifications and has a weather forecast widget, and can store music to playback on Bluetooth headphones. The watch doesn’t yet work with any streaming platforms, so you will need the digital files to drag and drop across to the watch, whereas Garmin works with Spotify, Deezer and Amazon Music so you can wirelessly transfer across your playlists.

It’s good to have the option to play music on the watch, but the way it’s done means it’s not a feature I’d use regularly. I mostly stream music and even getting hold of podcast files to transfer isn’t always easy. There is no app store for the Vertix 2S—though you can pick from a range of watch faces in the Coros app—and it doesn’t offer NFC payments. If you want a sporty smartwatch then Garmin is a better bet, while full smartwatches like the Apple Watch obviously offer more on this front.

Activity And Sleep Tracking

The Vertix 2S will diligently track the usual daily activity stats, like steps, active minutes and active calories burned, and it tracks your sleep if you wear it at night. It’s not the most comfortable watch to wear overnight, which is a problem with any large sports watch, but the sleep tracking was broadly accurate to me.

If you wear the watch at night it also provides a heart rate variability score in the morning, which is compared with your baseline. You can use this as a guide to how stressed your body is, and it can help guide how hard you push in training each day, since HRV is the main data used to underpin readiness scores from other brands. The Vertix 2S tracks stress levels throughout the day, and you can take a wellness check, which gives on-the-spot measurements of your HR, HRV, stress, breathing rate and SpO2. 

Is The Coros Vertix 2S Worth It?

The Vertix 2S is an excellent watch and a strong alternative to the Garmin Fenix 7 for those who want a watch that uses the best and most durable materials, and does the essentials of sports tracking well. You get more features from the best Garmin watches though, and the features Coros and Garmin have are generally more polished with Garmin, such as music and maps. 

The Fenix 7 is also in sales fairly regularly, so you may be able to get a titanium one for a similar price to the Vertix 2S, and that would be a better buy, while the Garmin Epix, Polar Grit X2 and Suunto Race are attractive alternatives with AMOLED screens.

The main upgrade you get here, compared with the Vertix 2, is improved GPS accuracy, which may not be a vital feature for some who’d rather have the longer battery life of the older watch, which is still getting regular software updates from Coros.

The Coros Pace 2 remains one of the best sports watches. Central to its appeal is the value it offers, and that’s also true of its successor. The Coros Pace 3 delivers great value despite a price rise over the Pace 2.

The Pace 3 is not just great value because of its features; during my testing it’s also proved to be one of the best running watches for accuracy. The features and performance of the Coros Pace 3 make it easy to recommend—unless you want or need the extra features you get on top devices, such as an AMOLED screen, maps or more rugged and attractive designs.

Coros Pace 3 Review: Price And Availability

The Coros Pace 3 launched in August 2023 and costs $229 in the US and £219 in the UK from Coros. That’s a notable jump in price on the Pace 2, which costs $199/£179.99, but even with that rise the Pace 3 is good value compared with the market at large, with the most comparable Garmin watch—the Forerunner 255 Music—costing $399.99/£349.99.

How I Tested This Watch

I’ve been using the Coros Pace 3 to track all my workouts and general activity over the past two weeks, running 85 miles in that time, including a half marathon, along with other workouts. I also wore the Garmin Epix Pro at the same time to compare the GPS accuracy of the watches, and linked the Garmin to a Polar H10 chest strap heart rate monitor to check the Pace 3’s HR accuracy. I have also tested the Pace and Pace 2, along with the rest of Coros’s range and most of the best sports watches on the market.

The review's swimming section content has been written by Charlie Allenby (see below).

Design And Hardware Specs

The Pace 3 is a small and lightweight watch: 1.05oz/30g with the nylon band and 1.3oz/38g with a silicone band. Its case and bezel is made from fiber-reinforced polymer, but despite the all-plastic design it didn’t feel cheap or flimsy to me.

The case looks and feels similar to the Pace 2, but the 1.2in display is now a touchscreen. It’s an LCD screen, though it has been upgraded since the Pace 2. I found the Pace 3’s display easy to read in all conditions, if not as vivid as the AMOLED displays you get on smartwatches or some of Garmin’s range.

The Coros Pace 3 has a 5ATM water-resistance rating and all the key sensors you need for sports tracking, including a barometric altimeter and pulse oximeter. It also features an upgraded optical heart rate sensor that’s an improvement on the Pace 2’s. 

Coros has upgraded the GPS tracking, and the Pace 3 offers multi-band GPS for increased accuracy, as well as all-systems-on and GPS-only modes for those who want to save battery life (since multi-band GPS is power-intensive). The Coros Pace 3 has 4GB of storage, which you can now use to store music on the watch. For now, you can drag and drop MP3 files across, but no other file formats are supported.

You can link external sensors to the Pace 3 via Bluetooth, but not ANT+, which is available on the Pace 2 and Garmin’s range of watches. Losing ANT+ won’t be a problem for most people because all new sensors support Bluetooth, but for cyclists and triathletes trying to pair a lot of sensors at once, ANT+ is often useful.

GPS And HR Accuracy

Adding multi-band GPS to a watch doesn’t automatically make it more accurate, something demonstrated in the past on Coros watches with this feature. I didn’t find the Coros Apex 2 Pro or Coros Vertix 2 to be particularly accurate despite having multi-band GPS, and they fell short of the standards set by the best watches in this area, Garmin’s multi-band devices and the Suunto Vertical.

Fortunately, in all my testing so far, the Pace 3 has been excellent on GPS accuracy. Testing it against the Garmin Epix Pro, with both watches in multi-band mode, I rarely saw any differences between the two. In a half marathon race in the countryside, the GPS plots were almost identical and both logged the distance of the race correctly.

I run in a forest near me several times a week and under tree cover the Pace 3 also impressed for accuracy, erring only slightly more than the Garmin Epix Pro. I’ve no complaints about GPS accuracy and this is a major upgrade for the Pace 3 compared with the Pace 2.

The heart rate tracking was also accurate during testing, matching well with the readings from a Polar H10 chest strap, even on tricky runs with intervals including hill reps. I’ve been using the Pace 3 in warm conditions, which can help improve optical heart rate sensor accuracy, but even so I was impressed with its performance.

Sports Tracking And Training Analysis

The Pace 3 has all the sports modes you’re likely to need, including open-water swimming and a multisport mode for triathletes. The Coros app has a useful structured-workout builder you can use to create sessions to follow on your wrist. You can also import training plans from third-party platforms like TrainingPeaks. However, Coros doesn’t offer suggested workouts or training plans itself, unlike Garmin and Polar.

I’ve found the EvoLab training analysis from Coros to be good whenever I have tested a Coros watch that has it, including the Pace 3. The race predictions were pretty accurate and the VO2 max estimate matched well to the results of a proper test using gas exchange.

There are suggested recovery times from the watch too, plus an overall view of your training load to see if it’s well balanced. The analysis you get from Garmin is more intuitive and easy to use, and has proved more accurate for me over time, though that may partly be down to the fact I’ve used a Garmin watch more consistently for several years. 

Coros doesn’t yet have anything like Garmin’s highly useful training readiness feature, which uses heart rate variability tracking as one factor. The Pace 3 cannot take HRV readings, unlike other watches in Coros’s range, which use their metal bezels.

Battery Life

Battery life has been a strong area for Coros and this remains the case with the Pace 3. Despite its small size it will last up to 24 days in watch mode, and offers 38 hours of GPS-only tracking.

These numbers will come down a lot with more intense use—for one, you only get 18 days of general use if using the Pace 3 to track your sleep. The GPS battery life dips to 15 hours using multi-band mode, and 25 hours if using all-systems-on. The optical HR monitor will only take readings every 10 minutes outside of workouts as standard, whereas most sports watches take real-time readings.

To test the battery life, I turned on continuous 24/7 heart rate tracking and tracked all my runs using multi-band GPS. I also had notifications coming into the watch, though I turned off vibrate because I find it annoying. Even when running almost every day, the Pace 3 lasted six or seven days on a charge, which is impressive given the small size of the watch.

Activity And Sleep Tracking

The Pace 3 tracks your steps, active calories burned, floors climbed and active minutes each day. It can also take a spot measurement of your resting heart rate, as well as estimating it through your general use. As an activity tracker it’s basic, though the step counts it logged matched with the totals I got from the Garmin Epix Pro. 

It’s also a basic sleep tracker. If you wear it at night you’ll get a graph of your sleep stages the next morning, plus your heart rate overnight. The Pace 3 doesn’t track HRV and doesn’t go into much depth about the general state of your body. On this front Garmin and Polar’s offerings are well ahead.

Swimming

The Coros Pace 3 has the same swimming features as the more expensive Coros Apex 2 Pro and Coros Vertix 2, and has separate activity modes for pool, open water, triathlon and multisport (handy for aquathlon, swimrun and aquabike events).

During my testing, I found the Pace 3 to be accurate when swimming in the pool. Tested alongside the Garmin Forerunner 955 Solar, the Pace 3 held its own against its more expensive multisport rival, and never miscounted the number of lengths I’d done during upwards of 10 hours of swimming (unlike the Garmin). Its built-in heart rate sensor works underwater and, while not as accurate as a chest-mounted strap, there weren’t any alarming spikes or dropouts that can happen with some wrist-based optical sensors.

Adding workouts to the watch was straightforward: simply build them in the Coros app before syncing to the watch. Following along was intuitive in the pool and at the end of each session, the activity was uploaded to the app where there was a wealth of data—from pace and SWOLF to training load and stroke rate—for me to pore over. 

It is also possible to use the GPS to navigate (as shown in the screenshot). The function only comes in handy during longer wild swims where you don't have things like buoys to sight but I thought it was worth highlighting as it is one of the watch's swimming features.—CA

Smart Features

The Coros Pace 3 can link to Bluetooth headphones to play music stored on the watch, but it’s an annoying and limited feature. The watch supports only MP3 files, which you have to drag and drop onto the watch via a wired connection. Having managed to locate some old music files I had in MP3 format, as well as downloading a podcast, I first had to reset the Pace 3 before it would show up on my computer as a drive I could drag files to. It takes a long time to transfer files as well.

Once your audio files are on the watch, pairing Bluetooth headphones and listening to them is easy, though I had to prompt the watch to connect to the headphones each time. It’s a much harder feature to use than the music storage on Garmin watches, which can link to streaming services like Spotify and Deezer to sync music across wirelessly, and smartwatches like the Apple Watch are also much more advanced on this front. 

Aside from music storage, there are no smartwatch features to speak of on the Pace 3 beyond notifications from your phone. There’s not even a weather forecast widget!

Navigation

The Pace 3 has breadcrumb navigation and Coros will add turn-by-turn directions to these routes in the near future—the feature is currently available in Beta mode. You can create routes within the Coros app to sync to the watch or import them into the app easily. For now, all you get is a line for the route with alerts if you stray too far off-course.

It’s not as useful as a watch with maps, which would cost a lot more, but the Pace 3’s breadcrumb navigation is enough to keep you on track when running in new places. You can also fire up a back-to-start feature during outdoor activities, if you ever need guiding back to your starting point.

Is The Coros Pace 3 Worth It?

The Coros Pace 3 is unequivocally worth its modest price. As well as nailing the basics of sports tracking and being accurate, it has extras like breadcrumb navigation, all at a price that’s below what you’d pay for a similarly capable watch from Garmin or others. Add the fact that Coros has a good track record of supporting its watches with software updates long after they launch, and the Pace 3 is undoubtedly the best-value sports watch available.

The biggest competition comes from the Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, which is a little more expensive, though as an older watch, it is often discounted. I think the Forerunner 255 is a better watch: The music feature is more developed, the training analysis is better, there are more smart features and in general the user experience is more intuitive than on the Coros. 

However, the differences are small and when it comes to the key features for sports tracking, the Pace 3 matches up well. I wouldn’t be prepared to pay a lot more for the Forerunner 255.

There are, of course, even cheaper options that are compelling, including the Pace 2. It’s still a capable watch, if less accurate and lacking in music storage. You can also get the Kiprun GPS 900 from Decathlon, which uses Coros software and has a more attractive design, though it doesn't have multi-band GPS or music storage. The Garmin Forerunner 55 is another affordable option that suits beginners well thanks to its suggested workouts and training plans, but it lacks features that the Pace 3 has.

As of now, the Coros Pace 3 is the watch I’d recommend to most people. There are cheaper, more beginner-friendly options, along with more expensive ones that dazzle with features and design, but the Pace 3 nails the sweet spot of price, accuracy and features.

The Coros Pace 2 is a hard act to follow. It’s one of the best sports watches available, offering a wide range of features, long battery life in a lightweight design, and outstanding value at $199/£179, especially seeing as Coros continues to support it with new features.

So, can the new Coros Pace 3 live up to the standards set by its predecessor? On paper, all the signs are good. The price has risen to $229/£219, but the new watch offers some valuable new features to justify this.

Chief among these is the addition of multi-band GPS and music storage. It also now comes with a touchscreen, and the battery life has been extended to 38 hours of standard GPS or 24 days in watch mode (up from 30 hours/20 days on the Pace 2), which is excellent given the small size of the Pace 3. It’s similar in size and weight to the Pace 2, weighing just 30g with the nylon band, and has a 1.2in LCD screen.

There are caveats to the multi-band GPS and music storage that are worth mentioning because you won’t find these features on other watches in the Coros Pace 3’s price range. On the GPS, having a multi-band mode doesn’t always result in vastly improved accuracy. It does on some watches, like Garmin’s range of multi-band devices or the Suunto Vertical, but on Coros watches I have often found the multi-band mode lacking, and that still seems to be the case after one run with the Coros Pace 3. It’s accurate enough, but not the step up in quality you get with multi-band elsewhere, even if it will probably be a modest improvement on the Pace 2.

The music storage is just for MP3 files, which you can drag and drop to the watch and then listen to via Bluetooth headphones. There is no support for streaming services, unlike on Garmin watches that link with Spotify among others, so unless you have the digital files for your music this new feature won’t do much for you.

These new features do improve what is already an excellent package for the price, however. The Pace 3 has training analysis through Coros’s EvoLab software, with stats available to analyze on the watch and the partner Coros app and website. It also has breadcrumb navigation and added turn-by-turn directions through a recent beta software update, and you can create routes in the Coros app to sync to the watch directly.

All of this is also available on the Coros Pace 2 though, and one thing you lose with the new watch is the ability to link it to external sensors via ANT+. You can still do this via Bluetooth, which is the more common way of linking up sensors in my experience, but losing ANT+ is a shame especially for cyclists and triathletes who use more accessories like power meters.

Overall the Coros Pace 3 looks to be a superb sports watch, and great value, even if some of the major new upgrades from the Pace 2 are perhaps not quite as good as they initially appear.

Renowned for making some of the best sports watches, Coros has moved into the heart rate monitor market with the launch of the Coros Heart Rate Monitor. This excellent device is one of the best heart rate monitors around, mainly due to how easy it is to use: Just slip it on your arm and it turns itself on, links with your watch and starts tracking.

I found the monitor accurate when compared with a chest strap heart rate monitor in my testing, and the battery life is good enough for weeks of workouts. It’s light on features relative to the Polar Verity Sense, and chest straps are available for less, but the Coros HRM is appealingly simple to use if you prefer to wear an armband.

Coros Heart Rate Monitor Review: Price And Availability

The Coros Heart Rate Monitor launched in the US in July 2023 and costs $79. It’s set to be available in other regions from September 2023. That price means it undercuts the Polar Verity Sense armband heart rate monitor, which is $99.95 in the US and £86.50 in the UK.

• Buy from Coros

Design

This Coros is an optical heart rate monitor that sits in a stretchy adjustable band made from nylon, polyester and spandex. There is a Velcro buckle you can undo to take the band off, though you can also just pull it on and off once it’s set to the right length.

It weighs 0.6oz/19g with the band included and is worn around the biceps, which is a more accurate spot than on the forearm because it’s thicker and moves less during activities. The band length can accommodate arm sizes from 7.09-12.6in (18-32cm).

The band itself can’t store workout data, but instead connects to external devices to broadcast the heart rate that it measures. It doesn’t connect via ANT+, only Bluetooth, but can support up to three Bluetooth connections at once. It connects to external devices from any brand, not just Coros watches.

Although the band is waterproof to 30m, with a 3ATM rating, it doesn’t currently have a swimming mode, though this may be added in the future. You can’t broadcast the heart rate to a watch via Bluetooth while swimming, or at least not reliably, because Bluetooth signals don’t travel well in water.

The band has no buttons, instead turning on automatically when you put it on and then turning itself off when you take it off. The rechargeable battery lasts for 38 hours of active tracking, or up to 80 days in standby mode.

How I Tested This Heart Rate Monitor

I’ve used the Coros Heart Rate Monitor to track all my workouts over the past few weeks. I run almost every day, and have also used it to track bike rides and one yoga session. For the first four runs I did with it I also wore the Polar H10 chest strap monitor connected to another watch, so I could compare the readings of the Coros with the accurate H10.

Sports Performance

The Coros monitor is simple to use. Once it’s set to the right length and linked to your watch—I used three different Garmin watches with it and the set-up was quick and easy—you just pull it on and off for your workouts. The band turns itself on and off reliably and doesn’t dally when it comes to the latter, saving battery life.

In the past I’ve found armband heart rate monitors worn on the biceps accurate—more so than the optical monitors worn on the wrist—and this was the case with the Coros monitor. I did four runs comparing it with the Polar H10 chest strap, including an interval session at the track and a tempo 10K, and it matched the strap beat for beat. 

There was also little lag behind the chest strap’s readings on intervals, which is impressive for an optical monitor even when worn on the arm. Overall, the accuracy was comparable to the Polar Verity Sense armband, and good enough that I felt comfortable using the Coros HRM as my main heart rate monitor instead of a chest strap.

For the most part, I don’t mind wearing a chest strap because I don’t find them uncomfortable, but the benefits of using an armband were obvious when I took it away for a week of trail-running including a 30-mile run. For these runs I wore a backpack with chest straps, and using an armband meant there was no jostling for position between my heart rate chest strap and the backpack straps.

Over the course of that long run, which was almost five hours, the Coros monitor was so comfortable as to be unnoticeable, and it stayed connected to my watch and delivered reliable readings throughout.

Battery Life

When I checked the battery life of the Coros HRM before and after workouts, the drain matched up well with Coros’s listed life of 38 hours of active use. The band will lose more battery life than your workout time because of the way it turns itself on and off, so it’s wise not to put it on until you’re starting your session, but it’s long-lasting enough that you don’t have to stress about juice. 

This battery life gives you more than the 30 hours you get from the Polar Verity Sense, although that has an on/off button so it’s easier to ensure you’re using the battery only when working out with the Polar monitor.

Is The Coros Heart Rate Monitor Worth It?

If you’re just looking for a simple, comfortable and accurate heart rate monitor, the Coros is an excellent choice. The smarter money probably goes towards the more advanced Polar Verity Sense, even at a slightly higher price, because the Polar can store workouts independently of a watch, broadcasts via ANT+ as well as Bluetooth, and has a swimming mode. The Coros has longer battery life and is easier to use.

You will still get slightly more reliable results using one of the best chest straps, like the Polar H9 or H10, and with chest straps like the Garmin HRM-Pro Plus you can also get extra stats like running dynamics. 

If you don’t need those features, however, I found the Coros Heart Rate Monitor the most convenient and comfortable monitor to use. That’s why it has replaced the Polar H10 as my go-to heart rate monitor.

While amateur runners will never have the time or support to replicate the marathon training of elite runners, there are always fascinating insights to draw from how pros train for big events like the Boston Marathon.

Sports scientist Derek Dalzell is the senior manager for consumer education at sports watch brand Coros, and has been analyzing the data of some of Coros’s sponsored elites ahead of the 2023 Boston Marathon, in particular US runner Colin Mickow’s training. 

We spoke to Dalzell to see what amateurs could take from Mickow’s approach to improve their own marathon training. The first insight isn’t all that surprising—elite runners run a lot—but interestingly they don’t really hit top gear and focus on their event until they are close to race day.

“One of the big takeaways is the volume,” says Dalzell. “The volume that they’re training at is exceptional. It’s 131 miles a week. Their aerobic base, their endurance, is massive. But then the big thing that I think a lot of amateurs don’t understand is that they don’t really start running hard until four to eight weeks out from the race. It’s a specific block. 

“If you look at [Mickow’s] training intensity 12 weeks out, eight weeks out and four weeks out, you can see the closer he gets to race day, the more miles he’s putting in at race pace.”

The first practical application for amateurs is not to overdo it at the start of marathon training.

“A lot of amateurs are just getting into it and have this new motivation. They go out and are like ‘I’m gonna push myself, I’m going to get in shape within the next two to four weeks’,” says Dalzell. “That can be a bad thing, because it’s not going to make running easy. Ultimately, you’re not going to want to keep doing it because it’s not sustainable.”

One way to make racking up a lot of miles in marathon training achievable is to ensure that your easy runs really are easy, with your heart rate remaining in your lower heart rate zones, no matter how slow that means you run.

“One thing we can take away from these pros is that they run in their easy training zones,” says Dalzell. “They run a lot of miles in zone 1 or their fat-burning zone, and amateurs would be shocked at how easy or how slow that would be for them. A lot of people aren’t running slow enough.”

Once you’ve built that base fitness through easy running, stepping up to start doing more work at speed becomes easier.

“A lot of amateurs never get to that point because they don’t go through the proper process,” says Dalzell. “They’re too tired and they haven’t established the aerobic base needed to sustain that level of training.”

One thing that Dalzell picked out about Mickow’s Boston Marathon training was the high amount of time spent at race pace in later weeks.

“Over the last four weeks, [Mickow] spent 56% of his time at race pace, which is a lot,” says Dalzell. “If you look at 12 weeks prior to race day, 70% of his time was easy, and only 30% was race pace. So the closer you get to race day, the more you want to specifically train that system to be prepared.”

Of course you can’t keep hammering out race pace runs right up to race day. A taper period ahead of a marathon is essential for runners of all levels.

“Each person’s individual [requirements are different], but if somebody’s been training properly, a taper is usually somewhere between eight to 14 days,” says Dalzell. “Mickow started his taper on 6th April, so 11 days out from Boston.”

While most of the marathon training that elite runners do for Boston will apply equally to any city event, the Boston Marathon route does have some well-known features, such as the Newton Hills, for which pros make specific preparations.

“It’s actually a lot of downhill,” says Dalzell. “There are uphill sections, that’s the famous stuff, but there’s a lot of downhills as well. We just interviewed [former US marathon champion] Emma Bates and she [told us she] has spent a lot of time training downhills in preparation for Boston, because she doesn’t want her quads to seize up at mile 22 or 23. It is a net downhill race. 

“Everybody focuses on the uphills, and don’t get me wrong—you have to be able to surge above your threshold on the uphill to stay with the pack. But if you don’t have your legs trained for downhill running as well, they’re gonna give out at a certain point.”

One thing that elites don’t tend to do in their marathon training is short, all-out intervals well above their threshold pace.

“Maybe if there’s something wrong with their turnover or their gait, they’ll do some 400s or 800s,” says Dalzell. “But a lot of elite marathoners, they’re not doing 400m repeats on the track. They’re building volume and their aerobic base at an easy level, then they might go up to do some above threshold very sporadically. If you look at Colin’s breakdown of zones, 98%-99% of his training is threshold or below.”

One last point that Dalzell highlighted about elites in comparison to amateur runners was cadence—the amount of steps you take per minute. 

“When an amateur starts running, for whatever reason, they settle in somewhere between 155 to 170 steps per minute,” says Dalzell. “Research says that each person has their own specific maximum efficiency of cadence, but it’s usually somewhere above 180. So a lot of amateurs are just not turning their feet over fast enough. 

“When you look at the elites, like Colin Mickow, Eliud Kipchoge, Emma Bates, they’re generally more like the 190 to 200 range. So not not only is their stride length longer, but they’re turning their feet over faster, almost 20 to 30 times more a minute than most amateurs do. 

“The takeaway there is you don’t have to run faster to increase your cadence. It’s a neurological pathway—it’s basically your brain sending a signal to your legs to pick up your feet. You can practice this on your easy runs. And the more you do, the more efficient you’re going to become. 

“If somebody’s not going to run 130 miles a week—which nobody’s really going to do, right?— but they want to improve as a runner, I will basically tell them ‘slow down, build your base, and increase your cadence on all runs’.”

The original Coros Apex was one of the best running watches, certainly in the value stakes, offering an attractive build and accurate tracking for under £300. It signalled that Coros represented a serious challenge to the established sports watch elite like Garmin and Polar with reliable devices that undercut the competition on price. With the subsequent Coros Pace 2, that challenge gained momentum.

Unfortunately, the Apex 2 feels like a step backwards in this regard, as does its sibling the Coros Apex 2 Pro. The Apex 2 has some useful updates, but the GPS accuracy seems to have gott worse with this generation, and a rise in price means it goes directly up against the Garmin Forerunner 255, which is a more accurate and impressive watch.

Coros Apex 2 Review: Price And Availability

The Coros Apex 2 was released in November 2022 and costs $399 in the US and £349 in the UK. That’s a rise in price on the original Coros Apex, which came in two sizes that cost $299/£269 for the 42mm watch and $349/£299 for the 46mm. The Apex 2 Pro launched at the same time as the Apex 2 and costs $499/£499.

Design

One area where the Coros Apex 2 outdoes its similarly priced competitors is in the quality of the materials used. It has a titanium-alloy bezel and a sapphire-glass touchscreen to help it stand out from the plastic devices you tend to find in its price range.

The Apex 2 has a 1.2in (30.5mm) screen, slightly smaller than the 1.3in (33mm) screen on the Apex 2 Pro, but the Apex 2 is a smaller, lighter watch overall, and a little more comfortable to wear. 

Like other Coros watches, the Apex 2 uses a combination of buttons and dial to navigate its menus, rather than the five-button design that’s standard on Garmin and Polar devices. The dial works well once you get used to it, and the Coros user interface is simple to understand and use.

The Apex 2 has a 5 ATM waterproof rating, which is lower than the 10 ATM rating on the original Apex, though still more than enough for any activity most people are likely to undertake while wearing it. The Apex 2 has 8GB of storage, significantly less than the 32GB on the Apex 2 Pro, but enough to load up plenty of music and routes.

Coros has redesigned the antennae on the Apex 2 to offer more accurate GPS tracking, and the Apex 2 offers all-systems-on multi-GNSS tracking, although not the dual-band GPS you get on the Apex 2 Pro and Coros Vertix 2.

The Apex 2 has added a new heart rate sensor and can take heart rate variability (HRV) readings on demand, but it doesn’t measure this through the night like Garmin and Polar watches. It can also measure your blood oxygen saturation, and other sensors on board include a barometric altimeter and a compass.

How I Tested This Watch

I have been wearing the Coros Apex 2 for two weeks in combination with the Coros Apex 2 Pro and other watches like the Garmin Epix 2 and Apple Watch Ultra. I have tracked approximately six hours of running with it across eight runs, along with several indoor and outdoor rides, plus a couple of yoga sessions. I have also tested the original Coros Apex, along with the Coros Vertix 2 and Coros Pace 2 watches.

Sports Tracking

Coros offers a comprehensive sports tracking experience across its range, and really the only criticism I can level at it is that the experience is pretty much the same on the cheaper Pace 2 as it is on the more expensive Apex 2 and Vertix 2 watches.

Runners and triathletes get the most stats to pore over, and runners in particular get the most from Coros’s Evolab training analysis, which can help you ensure your overall training load is productive.

You can create structured workouts and entire training plans to follow on the Apex 2, and along with all the standard stats you’d expect, Coros offers running power measured from the wrist plus its new “effort pace” metric. This is designed to create a consistent pace reading you can use to judge your effort on hilly courses, with the incline taken into account so your effort pace will be faster than your actual pace on uphills, and vice versa on downhills.

Coros even suggests future updates will allow it to analyse your training and personalise effort pace, to take into account whether you’re a strong uphill runner. It’s a nice idea and a good alternative to power for those who want one metric they can use to gauge their effort across different runs, but effort pace doesn’t seem to take into account terrain – running up a muddy hill requires more effort than an asphalt one – and I’m still unconvinced of the need for extra effort stats. Pace, heart rate and running on feel all work perfectly well for me.

GPS And Heart Rate Accuracy

Although the Apex 2 does not have the dual-band GPS available on the Apex 2 Pro, I was expecting it to be pretty accurate with the multi-GNSS all-systems-on mode available, which uses five satellite systems at once.

However, I noticed significant corner-cutting on almost all my runs with the Apex 2. This resulted in some inaccurate lap pacing along with a shorter overall distance by the end of the run. It’s not terrible and will serve the needs of most runners well on most runs, but it’s certainly annoying when running on a looped course. It seems worse to me than the GPS accuracy of the Coros Pace 2, which doesn’t have multi-GNSS tracking.

Coros spearheaded advances in GPS accuracy by introducing multi-band on the Vertix 2, but so far Garmin and Apple watches that use the technology produce far more accurate results in my experience, while the Coros watches that use it don’t seem a considerable upgrade on older devices.

The heart rate accuracy on the Apex 2 was more impressive, reliably matching up to within a few beats of a chest strap on most runs. Even so, I still recommend linking to an external heart rate monitor if you’re planning to use the Coros training analysis, since the most accurate data going in will result in the best analysis coming out. You can link a heart rate monitor through Bluetooth, but not ANT+, even though ANT+ was available on the original Apex watches.

Maps And Navigation

The colour maps on the Apex 2 are a stand-out feature at its price – the other watches in this range offer only breadcrumb navigation. The maps don’t come preloaded as is the case on the Apex 2 Pro, but you can download them from the Coros website and then when you follow a route on the watch it will be overlaid on the map. 

This is a useful upgrade on conventional breadcrumb navigation such as you’ll find on the Garmin Forerunner 255, where your route is shown on a blank background. However, the mapping features on the Coros are still a bit of a disappointment. There’s no turn-by-turn directions, though the watch will alert you if you stray too far off course, and in truth following a trail on a map is only a little easier than following it on a blank background, especially as watches like the Forerunner 255 do provide directions to alert you when turns are coming up.

At this price it’s still great to have maps, but I’d hope to see Coros update this feature to include directions, and also allow you to have a map screen on runs without needing to have a route loaded.

Garmin is still well ahead on mapping and navigation features, though you do have to spend more to get a Garmin watch with colour maps. The Garmin Forerunner 945 and Garmin Forerunner 955 both have them, along with the Fenix/Epix range and the Enduro 2.

Smart Features

There aren’t many smart features on the Coros Apex 2, which will mirror your phone’s notifications but doesn’t offer NFC payments, an app store or even a weather forecast. It does offer music storage so you can listen to music via Bluetooth headphones without having to carry your phone with you.

However, like maps, this is another feature which sounds better on paper than it is in practice. The watch doesn’t link to any streaming services (yet – Coros says it is working on this) so you have to drag and drop MP3 files onto the watch. If you have a huge library of MP3 files, congratulations. If not, then a Garmin watch that links to Spotify is probably going to be more useful.

Battery Life

Coros watches always impress on the battery front and the Apex 2 is no different. It is listed as lasting 17 days in smartwatch mode and offers 45 hours of standard GPS tracking, which drops to 30 hours in all-systems-on mode. 

Between activities the battery level barely drops, partly because of the way it is set up to take heart rate readings only every 10 minutes by default, and also because the Apex 2 doesn’t do a lot outside of activities – there’s no HRV tracking at night for example. 

However, it’s still impressive how long it lasts. The Apex 2 went 10-12 days between charges for me even when tracking outdoor runs almost every day.

Activity And Sleep Tracking

The Apex 2 tracks your steps, active minutes and floors climbed, and also monitors your sleep, providing a graph of your sleep stages in the morning.

It’s not a health watch and lacks the automatic HRV tracking that brands like Garmin and Polar use to gauge the overall condition of your body. If you can remember to do these each morning, you can use the readings to judge how hard to push in training each day. It’s a big “if” though – I rarely remembered to do them during the morning rush.

Is The Coros Apex 2 Worth It?

The Coros Apex 2 looks good and promises a lot on paper, but while it’s a great sports watch overall I found several frustrating aspects, notably the iffy GPS tracking. The maps and music features aren’t amazing, but the maps are still an upgrade on anything else you get on a watch at this price, including the Garmin Forerunner 255.

However, on most other fronts the Forerunner 255 wins out. It’s more accurate thanks to the multi-band GPS it offers, and the music version of the watch can link to Spotify plus other streaming services. The Apex 2 uses more impressive materials and offers longer battery life, but the Forerunner 255 is a more enjoyable and accurate tracker to use for serious training.

The Apex 2 is a better-value option than the Apex 2 Pro, because while the Pro has a longer battery life the standard Apex 2 model is still impressive here, and the multi-band GPS tracking on the Pro didn’t really end up being that much more accurate in its tracking (our Coros Apex 2 vs Coros Apex 2 Pro comparison goes into further detail). I still think the Coros Pace 2 is the pick of the line-up, however, since it offers everything Coros does best – detailed sports tracking, useful training analysis and good battery life – at a much lower price than the Apex 2. The Apex 2 has a better and hardier design, but the plastic Pace 2 is exceptionally light and quite appealing in its own way, and losing the maps and music you get on the Apex 2 isn’t a huge loss given the limitations.

The Coros Apex Pro 2 offers all the key features of Coros’s flagship Vertix 2 watch in a smaller, less rugged frame and at a lower price. It sits between the Vertix 2 and the new Apex 2 in Coros’s range, and rivals the likes of Garmin Forerunner 955 and the Polar Vantage V2, which I count among the best running watches available.

It’s a very capable watch, but it’s hard to recommend the Apex 2 Pro in its current form over the Forerunner 955 at a similar price, since many of its features are not as well implemented.

Coros Apex 2 Pro: Price And Availability

The Coros Apex 2 Pro is available to pre-order from the Coros website beginning 3rd November 2022 and costs $499 in the US and £499 in the UK, a big jump in price on the original Apex Pro, which cost $399/£349. The Coros Apex 2 was also released on 3rd November and costs $399/£419. Stiff competition to the Apex 2 Pro also comes from the Garmin Forerunner 955, which is $499/£479.

• Coros Apex 2 Vs Coros Apex 2 Pro: Which Coros Sports Watch Should You Get?

Design

The Apex 2 Pro is a bit chunkier than the original Apex Pro, weighing 53g compared with 49g, and it has a larger screen (1.3in/33mm vs 1.2in/30.5mm). It has a sapphire glass touchscreen with a titanium alloy bezel and a stainless steel cover, with plastic used for the casing.

Rather than the five buttons favoured by Garmin and Polar, Coros uses a digital crown on its watches, which you can press and spin to navigate its menus. The Apex 2 Pro has the crown between two buttons; one is the backlight button and the other a back/lap button.

Although the waterproof rating on the Apex 2 Pro has dropped to 5ATM from 10ATM on the original Apex Pro, it is still more than tough enough for any activity you’re likely to throw at it, and works in temperatures ranging from -22°F to 122°F (-30°C to 50°C). 

The Apex 2 Pro comes with Coros’s nylon band, which is comfortable to wear, dries surprisingly quickly after getting wet and helps to keep the weight of the watch down. In general the Apex 2 Pro is an attractive, comfortable watch to wear at all times, and an upgrade in looks on the all-plastic Coros Pace 2, which is the entry-level watch in the Coros range.

The antennae of the watch have been redesigned to improve GPS performance and now support dual-band GPS tracking for extra accuracy. The optical heart rate sensor has been redesigned as well, and the Apex 2 Pro can take heart rate variability tests, as well as tracking your blood oxygen saturation. Other sensors include a barometric altimeter and a compass.

How I Tested This Watch

I have had the Coros Apex 2 Pro for just over a week ahead of its launch, and have worn it for six runs and three indoors cycles. I have also been testing the Coros Apex 2, and have tested most of the Coros range extensively.

Sports Tracking

Aside from the addition of a multi-pitch climbing mode, the sports tracking on the Apex 2 Pro remains virtually identical to that on other Coros watches. It’s a comprehensive tracker for a wide range of sports, with detailed stats available for runners and triathletes in particular.

The watch measures running power from the wrist, but Coros is moving the focus away from power to its “effort pace” metric, which replaces “adjusted pace” on the watch. Effort pace takes incline into account, so it will be faster than your actual pace when running uphill, for example. This should mean you can use one metric to provide a consistent effort reading across a hilly run, as many runners do with power.

Coros also says that in the future it will be able to analyse data from your runs to make effort pace reflect the kind of runner you are, so if you are a strong uphill runner, this will be reflected in your personalised effort pace stats. It’s an interesting idea and, like power, has the potential to be a single stat you can use to judge your effort across a range of runs – but I’m still unconvinced that a majority of runners will move away from more established and easy-to-understand stats like pace and heart rate, or just running on feel.

There’s nothing to fault about the sports tracking available on the Apex 2 Pro, and it’s backed up by the detailed EvoLab training analysis on the watch and in the Coros app. All the stats you could want are available, and the watch is easy to use and clear to read in all conditions. 

The only flaws I can think of are that you get essentially the same experience on the cheaper Apex 2 and Pace 2 watches, and that you can only connect Bluetooth sensors to the Apex 2 Pro, whereas you could also link ANT+ devices on the original Apex and Apex Pro.

GPS And Heart Rate Accuracy

Among sports watch brands, Coros led the charge towards dual-band GPS and all-satellite-system tracking by introducing it on the Vertix 2 watch, but since then the accuracy of the Garmin devices with this feature have set the standard. This remains the case with the Apex 2 Pro, which is a highly accurate GPS watch but tends to have a few more wobbles on the run than the Garmin Epix 2, and it also cuts corners at times.

These wobbles don’t usually add up to inaccurate stats overall, though, and the pacing stats were consistent in the runs I did with the watch. I didn’t find the multi-band option on the Apex 2 Pro a worthwhile upgrade in accuracy compared with the all-systems-on mode, though, and using dual-band tracking cuts the battery life significantly. Coros suggests the multi-band mode is mainly for climbing, but on other watches like the Garmin Epix 2 and Forerunner 955 I’ve seen the dual-band tracking improve the GPS performance on all types of runs.

The heart rate tracking has been accurate in the main. As with all optical heart rate monitors it can lag behind the readings of a chest strap when interval training, and sometimes the reading would be off for a minute or two during runs, so for long-term use I would link up a heart rate chest strap to feed more accurate data into Coros’s EvoLab training analysis. If you’re not too fussed about that analysis, you can get by using the optical sensor on the watch to judge your level of effort.

Battery Life

The battery life on Coros devices has always impressed, with all of its watches outperforming the other options in their price range. The same is true of the Coros Apex 2 Pro, which lasts 30 days in smartwatch mode and offers 75 hours of standard GPS tracking, which drops to 45 hours in all-systems-on mode and 25 hours in dual-band mode.

The battery performance while GPS tracking is great, but it's in between runs where Coros watches excel. Heart rate readings are taken every 10 seconds outside of activities as standard (you can turn real-time tracking on) and heart rate variability is read only on demand, rather than all night long, but even so it’s remarkable how little battery is used between activities compared with Garmin and Polar devices. 

I’ve worn the Coros Apex 2 Pro for eight days and the battery life has dropped from full to 51%. Coros provides a handy breakdown of your usage in that time, so I can see I’ve done 3hr 35min of GPS activities, plus another 2hr 20min of indoor activities, and it estimates I have another 12 days of juice left, or 25 hours of GPS. I’d say those estimates are optimistic but the watch will easily clear the two-week hurdle.

Maps And Navigation

Coros introduced colour maps to its range for the first time with the Vertix 2, and they are now available on cheaper watches including both the Apex 2 and Apex 2 Pro (and Apex Pro). The maps do make following breadcrumb trails easier, but the navigation tools on the watches lag far behind the offering on Garmin devices with maps, including the Forerunner 955.

For one there are no turn-by-turn directions – all you get is an alert if you deviate from the trail. Although you do get an elevation chart during an activity with a route loaded, you don’t get the individual climb and descent analysis you get from Garmin’s ClimbPro feature. I also found the maps less clear than the ones on Garmin watches, and you can’t just set a map screen to show during activities – it only comes up in your data screens if you load a route.

Currently, the mapping tools on Coros are better than breadcrumb trails on a blank background but not that much better. I expect Coros to develop the mapping tools on its watches, but for now Garmin does mapping much better.

Smart Features

The music features on the Apex 2 Pro also fall a bit short, since it doesn’t link up to any streaming services – you have to drag and drop MP3 files across. For those who have eschewed streaming and stuck with having their own music library downloaded to their computer, this is vindication. For those who use streaming services and don’t own any files, it is not a feature you’re likely to use much. In comparison, Garmin watches with music can link with Spotify and other streaming services to sync playlists across to listen to offline. Coros says it hopes to link to streaming services in 2023.

Other than music storage there aren’t really any notable smart features on the Apex 2 Pro. It’s very much a sports watch, not a smart one. It will mirror phone notifications, but doesn’t even show a weather forecast on the watch, presumably to save battery.

Activity And Sleep Tracking

Sports are the focus of the Apex 2 Pro, but it will record your daily steps, floors climbed and active calories burned. It also tracks sleep and shows a graph of your sleep stages on the watch the following day. 

You can also take heart rate variability readings on the watch, but this has to be done manually. The idea would be to do this each morning to see how stressed your body is, but the test requires you to sit and hold the watch for a minute, and it’s very easy to forget to do on busy mornings. Other brands will track your heart rate variability overnight and give you a rating of how recovered you are, or how ready you are to train that day every morning. This probably carries a high cost in battery life, and Coros has opted to focus on the latter, which is a fair decision, but the training readiness feature on the Garmin Forerunner 955 is excellent and another reason I’d choose that watch over the Apex 2 Pro.

Is The Coros Apex 2 Pro Worth It?

The Coros Apex 2 Pro nails the basics of tracking and training analysis, and lasts a long time on a charge. However, there are lots of features on the watch that don’t stand up that well compared with the competition from Garmin in particular, and the Forerunner 955 is a better all-round watch at this price. The Apex 2 Pro lasts longer and has a more attractive design with the titanium alloy bezel, but the Garmin Forerunner 955 is still a good-looking watch with a battery that lasts a week, plus it has better mapping, music and training readiness features.

While the Apex 2 Pro is a significant upgrade on the original Apex Pro, it’s a lot more expensive, and the Apex Pro is still a highly effective sports watch. The Apex 2 is also cheaper and while it doesn’t have multi-band tracking and has a smaller screen and shorter battery life, whether those upgrades are worth the extra $100/£80. 

Coros launched the Apex 2 and Apex 2 Pro watches on the same day to refresh the middle of its sports watches range. Both are among the best running watches thanks to the extensive features they offer for the money, but it’s probably only worth spending the extra $80 in the US or £100 in the UK for the Apex 2 Pro if you value battery life very highly.

Coros Apex 2 Vs Coros Apex 2 Pro: Price And Availability

Both watches launched on 3rd November 2022. The Apex 2 costs $399/£349 and the Apex 2 Pro costs $499/£499. They are initially only available from the Coros website.

• Coros Apex 2 Pro Review

Design

The two watches use the same materials, with a sapphire glass touchscreen and a titanium alloy bezel, but the Apex 2 Pro’s case is larger and heavier, weighing 53g vs 42g for the Apex 2. The Pro has a larger screen at 1.3in (33mm) compared with 1.2in (30.5mm), and the screen is 260 x 260 resolution versus 240 x 240 on the Apex 2.

While the difference in screen size is noticeable when using both watches side by side and it makes stats on the Apex 2 Pro easier to read while running, that improvement is offset a little by the fact the Apex 2 is a lighter, smaller watch.

The Apex 2 Pro does put its extra size to good use with a bigger battery and also more storage, offering 32GB compared with 8GB on the Apex 2, which will be handy for those who want to fill their watch with music and routes.

Battery Life

One area where the Apex 2 Pro is a clear upgrade is battery life, it lasts almost twice as long as the Apex 2 in smartwatch mode, and offers 30 more hours of GPS battery life. However, the Apex 2 is still a long-lasting watch compared with other brands’ similarly priced devices.

Sports Tracking

Aside from the addition of a multi-pitch climbing mode to the Apex 2 Pro, the sports tracking offered by the two watches is the same, and both provide Coros’s EvoLab training analysis, which you can see on the watch, and in the partner app and website.

GPS And HR Accuracy

I have tested the Coros Apex 2 Pro and Apex 2 together on several runs and for the most part the performance of the GPS and heart rate monitor has been similar. However, the Apex 2 has been slightly more impressive on heart rate, closely matching a chest strap’s readings during runs, with its smaller, lighter design perhaps helping ensure a snugger fit against my wrist than that of the Apex 2 Pro.

Given that I set the Apex 2 Pro to multi-band mode I expected it to outperform the Apex 2 in all-systems-on mode, but this has not been the case in any of the three runs I’ve done with both watches. Neither has been perfect, often rounding off corners that are tracked more accurately by the Garmin Epix 2 in multi-band mode, but on every run the Apex 2 has been just as good as if not better than the Pro.

Based on my testing so far, I wouldn’t say paying extra for multi-band tracking on the Pro is worthwhile, and it uses more battery too. However, if you're a climber you may get more benefit from the multi-band mode, since this is where Coros suggests it comes into its own in reducing reflections in signal off tall walls.

Smart Features And Navigation

Coros focuses on the sports rather than the smarts with its watches, but both the Apex 2 and Apex 2 Pro offer music storage. You have to drag and drop MP3 files across to the watches, with no links to streaming services yet, which undercuts its usefulness as a feature.

Both watches also offer Coros’s mapping features. If you create a route and sync it to the watch, you can select it and it will appear during outdoor activities overlaid on a colour map, along with a graph profiling the elevation on the route. You don’t get turn-by-turn navigation but both watches will alert you when you deviate from the course.

Simply put, a brilliant budget sports watch with a huge battery life. It is equipped with all the fundamental features runners require, it can programme and guide you through strength sessions, and it has a triathlon multi-sport mode. All of that for £180 is quite the bargain.

I’d rate the Coros Pace 2 alongside the best running watches under £200, and it’s certainly the best triathlon watch you can get for that price. While the Polar Ignite 2 offers more impressive sleep analysis and guided workouts, and the Garmin Forerunner 45 is also excellent, the Pace 2 has that lengthy battery life, accurate and detailed tracking, and useful extras like running power and insightful training analysis.

If you’re prepared to spend a little more, you’ll find the excellent Garmin Forerunner 245 in the £200-£300 bracket, which combines handy extras like music (on the more expensive 245 Music) and breadcrumb navigation with brilliant sports tracking and training analysis. There’s also the Coros Apex to consider if you can stretch to £300, which has the same features as the Pace 2 plus breadcrumb navigation and a smarter look and feel.

Running With The Coros Pace 2

The Pace 2 has a comprehensive set of running sensors and features previously reserved for devices that cost at least £250. That includes built-in GPS (plus the Russian GLONASS and Chinese Beidou systems, with the EU’s Galileo promised in a future update) and a barometric altimeter for more accurate elevation tracking. The watch can also connect to external sensors using either ANT+ or Bluetooth.

You can also get running power data using a wrist reading without the need for a pod – something I’ve previously seen only on Polar’s flagship Vantage V and Grit X watches. And, if you link the watch to a running footpod like the Stryd or Coros’s own device, you can see running technique metrics such as ground contact time on your wrist.

I found that the distance tracking of runs was accurate and the pace readings on the watch were fairly smooth, though I’d suggest using lap pace rather than current pace, which can be a bit jumpy.

The heart rate tracking didn’t perform as well, though. It lagged behind the readings from a chest strap during an interval session and was often way off the correct reading at the start of my runs, though it usually settled down after a few minutes on steady runs and was fairly close to the chest strap reading. I’d recommend pairing a chest strap with the Pace 2 for more accurate readings.

The Pace 2 also has a Track Run mode, which allows you to set the lane you’re running in during track workouts for more accurate distance measurements. I’ve used this feature many times in track workouts and it does provide a noticeable upgrade on GPS accuracy, though it still isn’t flawless at handling the distance covered.

I’m not entirely convinced this mode is needed, though, because a 400m track is fairly easy to measure distance on. Still, if you want a more precise set of stats to pore over and upload to Strava afterwards, you do get it with Track Mode, and where Coros has led others have followed – Garmin now offers a track run mode on several of its watches including the Forerunner 245 and Fenix 6 series.

One feature that isn’t on the Pace 2 is breadcrumb navigation, which is reserved for more expensive Coros devices starting with the £300 Apex. It’s an understandable omission given that navigation is rarely found on watches under £200, but a shame given that Coros has thrown pretty much everything else into the Pace 2.

However, the Pace 2 now has Coros's EvoLab feature, which brings detailed training analysis to the company’s range for the first time. This new feature brings in insights such as recovery advice, training load information, a base fitness rating and estimated race times.

You can use this data to see if you’re training at the right level, helping to prevent overtraining or highlighting areas limiting improvements in your base fitness. The recovery advice includes info on how long it will be before you’re ready for easy or hard training, as well as a timer for when you will be fully recovered.

The data is explained clearly in the Coros app, and you also get a simplified rating like “good” or “optimised” to make the data easy to understand. This guidance helps with ratings like fatigue where you want to be pushing your body to some extent, but not overdoing it.

There is also a marathon level rating, which is linked to your predicted time for a full marathon and is used to rate your performance on each training run. If you underperform (based on things like heart rate for pace) you’ll get a running performance of, say, 97% of your marathon level. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – when training hard you won’t be in peak condition on every run, but when a race (of any distance) is coming up you’d hope to see a running performance score of over 100%, suggesting you’re in prime shape to log a PB.

The new insights are shown on both the Pace 2 itself, where you get colourful graphs giving feedback on your current status, and in the Coros app, where you can see how things like your fatigue, base fitness and training load impact change over time. In the app you are also given a VO2 max estimate, along with an estimate of your resting heart rate, threshold pace and threshold heart rate.

I found that the race predictions gave an insight into the accuracy of the rest of the data collected. The EvoLab numbers are generous but a little closer to my recent PBs than the times I get from Garmin and Polar, and they come with the pace needed to run the predicted time, which is a useful touch.

The new training analysis is an important addition across Coros’s range. In pricier watches like the Apex and Vertix it helps Coros keep pace with its rivals, but at the Pace 2’s price it’s a stand-out feature. The EvoLab features are available on all Coros devices apart from the original Coros Pace, though owners of that watch will still get the EvoLab analysis in the Coros app.

Overall, you really can’t argue with the running features you’re getting on the Pace 2 for £180, and the on-paper promise is backed up by real-world performance. This watch will meet and indeed surpass the needs of most runners, offering a wealth of stats and accurate tracking.

Sports Tracking With The Coros Pace 2

The Coros Pace 2 covers running, cycling and swimming (both indoor and open-water swimming), plus a triathlon multi-sport mode so you can change disciplines in the same session. In addition you’ll find generic indoor and outdoor cardio training, as well as strength sessions.

The watch supports structured workouts which you can set up in the partner app, or you can create basic interval sessions on the device itself. With running, cycling and swimming workouts you can set targets for each effort based on pace or heart rate. For strength training you can build workouts using exercises from the library (or by adding your own), and see which muscles the workout targets with a heatmap overlaid on an image of the body.

Many of Coros’s new EvoLab training analysis features extend to all sports, including things like recovery times, training load impact and base fitness ratings, and estimated fatigue. There are also training insights available during a workout, starting with the stamina stat that provides an estimate of your remaining energy as a percentage, which drops as you exercise and rises between training sessions.

When exercising you can also see the training effect of your session on your aerobic and anaerobic fitness, watching the score for each tick up. Long, steady efforts build aerobic fitness, while working in the highest heart rate zones – usually in short bursts – increases your anaerobic fitness.

For a long time a full triathlon mode was something restricted to higher-end sports watches. It’s a model Garmin has stuck with – the entry-level triathlon watch in its current line-up is the Forerunner 745, which is £450. The Coros Pace 2, a high-quality triathlon watch for less than half the price, makes that seem risible. Although it may lack some of the extra features like music and navigation, which you get in top-drawer watches, for actual tracking and workouts I’ve found the Pace 2 to be just as good.

Activity Tracking With The Coros Pace 2

Sports tracking is the Pace 2’s bread and butter. With its plasticky design it’s not necessarily ideal to wear at all times, but if you keep it on you’ll get a decent array of everyday activity stats. That includes steps and daily active calories, and you can choose to track your heart rate continuously or at ten-minute intervals. I selected 24/7 tracking because the Pace 2 has battery life to spare.

Sleep Tracking With The Coros Pace 2

The small, lightweight Pace 2 is very comfortable to wear at night, and if you do you get a graph of your sleep in the Coros app the day afterwards. This shows the periods you spent in deep and light sleep, plus your heart rate and time awake during the night.

It’s not very detailed stuff compared with what you get from Polar, Fitbit, Withings or Huawei, and it’s even lighter on detail than Garmin’s fairly basic sleep tracking. It’s passable, but if sleep tracking is a major priority for you then a Polar device would be the better option.

Smart Features On The Coros Pace 2

There really aren’t any smart features on the Pace 2 aside from displaying your phone’s notifications. You can get some features like music and weather on some devices around the £200 mark, like the Apple Watch 3 or Fitbit Versa 3, but you can’t get them in concert with sports tracking that’s as good as the Pace 2’s.

Battery Performance On The Coros Pace 2

While the Pace 2 impresses on several fronts, the battery life is where it really shines. It offers 30 hours of GPS battery life and in my experience it barely drains at all between training sessions, even with 24/7 heart rate and notifications enabled. It would last ten to 12 days during a busy training period where I would be running outside most days and also doing strength, yoga and cycling sessions indoors.

To put that into context, it lasted longer than the Garmin Fenix 6 Pro I was wearing on my other wrist. That watch costs £600 and offers 36 hours of GPS but drains faster in between training. The only watches that can really beat the Pace 2 on battery are Coros’s more expensive devices, like the Vertix, which offers 60 hours of GPS battery life, or Garmin’s biggest and most expensive watches like the Fenix 6X Pro.

Design Of The Coros Pace 2

The Pace 2 isn’t a garish watch, but it is still clearly a sports watch whether you pair it with the silicone or nylon straps available for it. It’s no less attractive than Garmin’s cheaper Forerunners, but it’s not as stylish as smartwatches from the likes of Fitbit, Huawei and Apple at the same price or less, and Polar’s Ignite sports watch is also more suited to everyday wear.

Buy from Coros | £599.99

Should You Buy Something Else?

At the moment the answer is an unequivocal yes. The Garmin Fenix 6 Pro costs the same and although its battery life isn’t up to the Vertix 2’s, it does pretty much everything else a little better for a superior all-round experience. The mapping features are more sophisticated, the watch can link to a premium Spotify account for easier music management, and there are more general activity tracking features as well.

Aside from battery life, the Vertix 2’s outstanding feature compared with the Fenix is the dual-frequency GPS mode, but in my testing this hasn’t proved to be a worthwhile upgrade on regular GPS.

There’s still a lot to like about the Vertix 2 and it does have a more rugged design than the Fenix, which will appeal to climbers and other adventurous types hitting the mountains for expeditions. I also expect software updates will improve features like the maps in time, and it is more feature-rich on some fronts than the top watches from Polar and Suunto. Overall, though, the Vertix 2 is tough to recommend over the Fenix – or indeed the Forerunner 945, which has the same features as the Fenix in a lightweight, plastic design.

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• The Best Running Watches Of 2021
• Garmin Fenix 6 Pro Review: The Best Gets Better
• Coros Pace 2 Review: The Best Budget Sports Watch

Coros Vertix 2 In-Depth

Design

For better or worse, the Vertix 2 is a beast. It weighs 89g with the silicone band, has a titanium bezel and cover and a sapphire display, and is big on the wrist. I found the watch a little too much for my skinny wrists and I tended to take it off at night because it was hot and uncomfortable.

However, the rugged design will certainly appeal to many who like their watch to scream adventure, and the use of titanium and sapphire glass makes the Vertix 2 relatively good value at £600, given that you pay £800 for a Fenix 6 Pro made from those materials.

The 1.4in (36mm) screen is bigger than on the original Vertix and provides room for up to eight stats at once during an activity. Unfortunately I’ve found it looks a little dull both indoors and out, and you can’t increase the brightness of the screen, which at times makes it hard to read.

GPS Accuracy

The feature I was most intrigued by was the new dual-frequency GNSS chipset that promised better GPS accuracy in difficult conditions, such as under tree cover or surrounded by high buildings. Poor GPS leads to poor pace and distance stats, and stresses me out enormously, so I was excited by the idea of greater accuracy.

After more than 400km of running, during which I compared the Vertix 2’s readings with those from many other watches, it has failed to convince me that it’s a solution to GPS troubles. There are times when it seems fantastic, accurately spotting which side of the road I’m running on and nailing each turn, but it still struggles under trees or among tall buildings.

In fact, the Vertix 2 was actually less accurate than other devices sometimes. Coros uses smoothing to try to make GPS tracking more accurate, but if you run a route with lots of sharp turns, or run loops (something I do for hard road workouts), the smoothed tracks can cut corners off your run and bring the distance down considerably.

On point-to-point routes, the Vertix 2 was as good as other watches and sometimes a little better. During a race in central London it went slightly less haywire among the tall buildings of Canary Wharf than the Fenix on my other arm. However, it still did go wrong, and in practical terms it was no more useful for pacing that race as a result.

This is an area where Coros might be able to fine-tune the accuracy through software updates, but for now the dual-frequency mode doesn’t resolve GPS troubles. Turning it on also brings the battery life down to 50 hours in tracking mode, as opposed to the 140 you get in GPS-only, or 90 hours in All Systems On mode. In that mode, the Vertix will use all satellite systems simultaneously, including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and Beidou. For now I’d suggest using All Systems On mode, since it doesn’t seem any less accurate and the 90 hours of tracking on offer is the most I’ve come across.

Maps And Navigation

The new offline maps on the Coros Vertix 2 come in three flavours. You can choose street view, topographical or a hybrid. The watch comes with a global offline landscape map for the street view, and the topographical maps for your region can be downloaded from the Coros website. The original Vertix and Apex Pro watches will also be getting topographical maps via an update before the end of the year, but not the landscape maps.

While breadcrumb navigation is generally enough to guide you through routes, having full maps is a considerable improvement. The context you get from a map makes it easier to follow the right trail, and it can sometimes open up new routes to you.

The maps on the Vertix 2 do deliver these benefits but still left me slightly disappointed. The biggest flaw is the lack of turn-by-turn instructions – you get a line on a map for your route, and have to look out for turns yourself, unless you go entirely off course in which case you’ll get a compass pointer back to your pre-planned route. There are also no street or place names on the map, and this, combined with the washed-out graphics, makes it harder to follow a route than it should be.

You also can’t add a map screen to your sports mode set-up – you have to load and choose a route before the map appears in your running or cycling data screens, for example. Loading routes is also more work than with other watches that link directly to route planning apps like Komoot, or have apps where you can create a route to sync to the watch directly. With the Vertix 2 I had to create or find a route online, then email or AirDrop it to my phone to open in the Coros app to sync to the watch.

Without turn-by-turn directions and street names the maps and navigation tools here aren’t the significant improvement on breadcrumb navigation I’d expected, especially if you use a watch that has turn-by-turn alerts for its breadcrumb routes. That said, it’s great to see offline maps available on a non-Garmin device, and there were times during my testing when having a map on my wrist made a big difference compared with a breadcrumb trail – either to make my route clearer or show me paths I didn’t know existed.

Music

It’s easy enough to pair Bluetooth headphones to the Vertix 2 and the connection was reliable during my runs. However, the management of your audio files is a faff.

For one, you have to plug the watch in and drag and drop any music or podcasts you want to listen to across, which is a bit 90s. I don’t really own any music files anymore, having succumbed to streaming services like most, and even finding and downloading podcast episodes to my computer took a bit of time.

Once you have got your audio files on the watch they are dumped into one mega playlist with no way to divide them up. From there you can play, pause and skip, and set the playlist to shuffle.

I’d only bother using this music feature once in a blue moon for a race, when I might take the time to sort out a playlist or find some podcasts to listen to. It’s simply too much of a hassle to transfer new files across for your daily training, even if you have the files. Garmin’s music devices support Spotify, which allows you to wirelessly transfer playlists across to listen offline, and there are many other devices that link to some kind of streaming service to make things easier.

You also can’t use the Vertix 2 to control playback on your phone if you do have it with you, which would be handy, though most sets of headphones can control your phone anyway.

Again, this is a feature that looks a lot better on paper than it does in practice. It has music storage, and to be fair that’s more than you get from most sports devices outside of Garmin’s range, but the storage is provided in a way that will benefit a minority of people.

Battery Life

Coros watches are renowned for their superb battery life, and this is more the case than ever. Even with the dual-frequency GPS mode activated it lasted me 19 days on my first charge when tracking running outside for around seven to eight hours a week, plus the odd cycle and indoor workouts. When using the All Systems On GPS tracking, you’ll get more than a month out of the Vertix 2 very comfortably, and between activities it barely uses any battery at all.

Part of that is down to the somewhat dull screen and the default heart rate tracking of taking a reading every 10 minutes when not exercising. You can change the latter to continuous tracking, but you can’t change the brightness of the screen unfortunately. Even so, this is the best battery you’re going to find in a sports watch, outperforming even the Garmin Enduro, which offers 80 hours of GPS tracking and tended to last me three to four weeks on a charge.

EvoLab Training Analysis

One area where Coros used to fall behind rival watches was in training analysis, but the recent launch of EvoLab has brought the entire Coros line-up up to par. EvoLab offers range of metrics to help you train at the right intensity to keep improving, estimating your overall fitness and training load, advising you on how long you need to recover after a run and providing race predictions for 5K, 10K, half marathon and marathon events – I found these were closer to the mark than those from other brands.

There are some confusing aspects of EvoLab though, not least how you go about getting the stats in the first place. You have to log 150 minutes of steady running on flat roads to kick-start EvoLab’s analysis, and even after that many of the metrics only use data from flat road or track runs, so trail runners and people who do any other sport don’t get nearly as much from it.

It also gives a “marathon level” to all users, a score based on its estimate of how fast you’d be able to complete a marathon. Once you have this score your daily runs are rated against your marathon level, which is set at 100%. So if your performance was deemed lacking compared with your marathon level, you’ll get a score of 88%, for example; if you outperform yourself, you’ll get a percentage rating over 100%. If that all sounds confusing you’re not alone. I have used EvoLab for several months and now tend to ignore the running performance stat entirely, especially as it only appears after flat, steady effort runs.

The training load and recovery advice is more useful, though I’d still say that only runners will benefit from EvoLab significantly, and road runners at that. As with other features on the Vertix 2, EvoLab is a good start, and I expect there will be more to come from it in the future, but for now you’ll find more polished offerings from Polar and Garmin.

Activity And Sleep Tracking

The Vertix 2 is unashamedly a performance-focused sports watch, but it does offer the standard daily activity stats like steps, active time and active calories. It also tracks your sleep and can take heart rate variability measurements. To do the latter you fire up the test then rest your other hand on the bezel of the watch for 60 seconds. It takes an ECG as well, though it’s not yet approved as a medical-grade device so the only result you get is an HRV score which says if you’re relaxed and recovering quickly or not.

If you remember to take these tests each day, ideally early in the morning, you can use them to give a general picture of the state of your body during a busy training period. However, it’s hard to remember to do this and the HRV feature isn’t nearly so well integrated into the device as it is with, say, Garmin’s Body Battery or Polar’s sleep tracking and recovery features.

I should confess that I use headphones while cycling. I should also confess that the most recent entry into my Google history is, “Is cycling with headphones illegal?” (It is not.) In my defence I just use the left bud to keep the ear on the side of passing traffic open, but it’s a set-up that suits me well, so this smart helmet which pipes sound into your open ear would have to be really something to persuade me to switch. Unfortunately, it falls short on that front and most others – including fit, additional smart features and other safety features.

The fit issue deserves a caveat: I probably would have been better served by a different size. I won’t accept any blame, however. For one thing, the only sizing chart I could find online was this on an Australian bike retailer’s website. For two, there’s a centimetre or so’s crossover between sizes and I found myself in that crossover range and decided to plump for the large over the medium. If you find yourself in the same situation I’d advise you to size down since the design is a bit bulbous. Ideally, the sound cannons should rest against your face at the top of your jawbones, and the larger size combined with my narrow face meant they didn’t sit snugly. Attempting to do this meant overtightening other areas, so it was all a bit uncomfortable.

This fit would have also affected my experience of the sound, although pressing and holding the cannon in the right place let me know what I was missing and it wasn’t much. Anything melodic was passable, but attempting to listen to bass-heavy dance music was a total bust. I also found podcasts would get drowned out by the sound of traffic. I really couldn’t wait to get back to one earphone.

There are a couple of other smart features. There’s a windproof microphone so you can take a call and give commands to your linked phone’s smart assistant. The mic picked up my commands just fine but a test call was cut short when the person on the other end of the line complained about the roar of traffic in her ear. This was at 8.30pm on a B road in south London with just a few cars passing me by.

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You can also control the helmet and music on the connected phone using a handlebar-mounted remote. There are five buttons, four of them bi-directional, and pressing and holding them triggers different functions. In other words, it’s not very intuitive, which made it even harder to control when riding in the dark as I struggled to keep my eyes on the road and remember which button did what and where it was.

The other smart feature is automatic crash detection, which will send your location to up to three pre-selected contacts. Thankfully, this was not a feature that was triggered while I wore the helmet. I suppose it may come in useful if a contact knows I’m riding in the dead of night, but otherwise I’d trust passers-by to do more for me than someone in a different location. Can you imagine the panicked, confused 999 call they’d have to make?

In terms of safety, the helmet obviously meets the legal safety standards for sale, but it lacks MIPS (and its equivalents) – the technology that essentially dissipates rotational forces which may help in certain types of hits to the head. It’s by no means the be-all and end-all of safety, but I’d suggest the £105 the SafeSound costs would be better spent on a bike helmet with MIPS and a pair of wireless headphones (you can currently get the Jaybird Tarah, which I use, for £50 at John Lewis).

The Coros Vertix is a chunky sports watch very much in the mould of Garmin’s Fenix line. It’s designed for adventurers who are all about spending serious time in the great outdoors and it will serve those people very well. But while it has some outstanding features, its everlasting battery life chief among them, and offers reliable sports tracking, the Vertix doesn’t quite live up to its mammoth £500-plus price.

£449.00Buy now

Should I Consider Buying Something Else?

Although it is a great watch, it’s hard to recommend buying the Coros Vertix when the Garmin Forerunner 945 or Fenix 6 Pro are in the same price range. The Garmins bring several excellent extra features to the table, most notably colour maps for best-in-class navigation, insightful training analysis, plus music storage.

Another strong option is the Polar Grit X, which doesn’t have the premium design of the Coros but does offer similarly excellent features for the adventurous runner in particular, with turn-by-turn navigation and an impressive fuelling feature that can help you plan what you need to eat to get through long training sessions and races. The Grit also offers Polar’s insightful training and sleep analysis, and costs much less at £379.

However, the Vertix does have all those watches beat on the battery front, which counts for a lot. The rugged design will also appeal to mountaineers, as will the promise of withstanding temperatures of -30°C with the battery still lasting for 21 hours of GPS. I still think those people would be better off with the Fenix’s full maps, but the Vertix is undoubtedly well suited to extreme conditions.

£449.00Buy now

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Coros Vertix In-Depth Review

Running With The Coros Vertix

The Vertix is a well-rounded running tracker which does a great job of nailing the basics, but lacks a few of the premium features that you might expect from a £500-plus watch. It doesn’t have the full maps you get on a Garmin Fenix 6 or Forerunner 945 for example, just the basic breadcrumb navigation that you find on most mid-range running watches, and the training insights are also sub-par compared with what you get from Garmin or Polar.

As for the basics, the Vertix is fast to find GPS and provides accurate distance tracking when compared with a calibrated footpod. I found the heart rate tracking surprisingly accurate for such a large watch too. It’s still not perfect and I’d prefer to use a chest strap (you can connect one via either Bluetooth or ANT+), but in the majority of my runs the Vertix stayed within a few beats of the reading from a chest strap, and it outperformed the Polar Grit X on this front.

The screen is clear to read in all conditions and you can put up to six stats on a page. The watch also has Coros’s dedicated track run mode, which is designed to provide more accurate distance measurements, because GPS can sometimes struggle when you’re running in 400m ovals. With the track mode you select the lane you’re running in and the watch uses algorithms along with GPS to give you a more accurate distance measurement.

It’s a nice idea, and it is true that many watches give poor distance readings on the track. However, I’ve found Garmin and Coros watches to be pretty accurate on the track using just GPS, and frankly, I don’t really see why you’d need a watch to monitor your distance on the track. That’s the beauty of a 400m ring with markings every 100m – you know exactly how far you’ve run.

When running you are also given three measurements: your overall stamina, and the aerobic and anaerobic effect of your workout. The first of those ticks down from 100% in accordance with how hard you’re working, and the aerobic and anaerobic numbers tick up from zero to 3.5 based on what your workout involves – a long steady effort works your aerobic system, while short intervals boost your anaerobic fitness.

The stamina measurement is a nifty feature, and the number carries over throughout your day so you can keep tabs on how well you’re recovering from your session, and then check what your rating is before starting your next run and adjust your intensity accordingly. Both stamina and the training effect numbers require precise heart rate measurements to be worthwhile, though, so if you want to use them I’d recommend investing in a chest strap.

Coros has also recently added a structured workout builder for running, cycling and swimming. You can now set up more complex workouts step by step in the Coros app, with targets for each step based on pace or heart rate. Sync them to the watch and you’ll get a dedicated workout screen on your running profile that has a pointer to show if you’re using the right pace or heart rate zone.

The Vertix impressed me with the steadiness of its current pace reading – it’s one of the best watches I’ve tried on this front – and so the pointer is useful in giving feedback on whether you’re holding the right pace. This feature, which will also be coming to the Apex and Apex Pro watches, is something Coros users have been requesting for a while, so it’s good to see the company respond with this update.

The app gives you insights into your training and fitness markers, including estimates of your VO2 max and threshold pace. These are always a little iffy with any watch compared with a lab measurement, but you can use them as a guide and look for any trends that indicate whether your fitness is increasing or decreasing. However, the threshold pace in particular on Coros watches has always been bizarrely ambitious for me – suggesting I could hold an incredible pace that would put me in line for the Olympics and several world records to boot.

The Vertix also offers breadcrumb navigation, with a line and pointer on screen showing you the way to go, plus alerts if you deviate from this path by more than 20m for more than ten seconds. You can’t create new routes in the app, though you can save previous runs as a route if you like, but it’s pretty simple to load GPX files from whatever route builder you use into the app and then sync them to your watch.

All in all, the Vertix is a great running watch, offering accurate tracking and all the key features runners need, backed up by its awesome battery life – even if running daily, you’ll get through a couple of weeks without charging. However, it does lack the kind of stand-out features you might expect on a £500-plus watch, such as maps or more in-depth training and recovery analysis; all its running-specific features can be found on £300 watches, including Coros’s own Apex. The rugged design and incredible battery life are what elevates it beyond those mid-range devices, so you’ll have to decide whether those are worth the extra money.

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Sports Tracking With The Coros Vertix

When Coros first started producing watches the range of sports modes available was limited to running, cycling, swimming and triathlon. The company has since developed its software and the Vertix now has all the other key modes most people would want, including a strength training mode as of its most recent update.

This automatically counts your reps and allows you to create full workouts in the partner app and beam them to the watch for you to follow. The app has a decent bank of common strength moves to select from when setting up a workout, but you can also add exercises easily enough. I found the rep counting to be hit and miss, even on exercises like squats which I expected would be easy to clock, but the workout mode is still great for people who love to map out every step of their training in advance. Once you’re done with your workout you can also view a muscle heatmap in the app to see if you’re consistently missing any body parts with your choice of exercises.

The Vertix still doesn’t offer the vast range of sports modes you’ll get on a watch from Garmin, Suunto or Polar. However, a lot of those modes are often superfluous, since outside of the main modes like running, cycling, swimming and strength the two things that can be tracked are time and calories burned. It’s nice to be able to label every workout you do correctly, but an all-encompassing “other” mode does the job for me.

Activity Tracking With The Coros Vertix

The Vertix does also offer everyday activity tracking, and in the app and on the watch you can see stats like your daily active calories and steps, along with continuous heart rate tracking. You need to turn the latter on because by default the watch will record your heart rate at ten-minute intervals when not exercising. That’s to save battery, but it really isn’t necessary to save battery with this watch. I even set the backlight to come on when you press buttons in the daytime, just to see if I could wear it down.

There’s no inactivity warning on the Vertix that buzzes when you sit still for too long, which would be a handy addition that is present on other sports watches, but in general the Vertix offers a solid everyday activity tracking experience even if it’s not the watch’s main purpose.

Sleep Tracking With The Coros Vertix

The Vertix’s sleep tracking feature gives you a graph of your night’s rest in the app the next day, showing your deep and light sleep periods, along with your heart rate. However, although the Vertix is light for its size, I found it a bit too bulky to wear at night comfortably, so I usually took it off. The sleep tracking is fine, but not insightful enough to motivate me to suffer the annoyance of wearing it while trying to sleep.

How Often Am I Going To Have To Charge It?

The Vertix offers 60 hours of GPS tracking on a single charge, which isn’t unique – the Garmin Fenix 6X Pro also offers 60 hours of GPS – but what sets the Vertix apart is how little juice it loses between activities. Even with 24/7 heart rate monitoring and the backlight set to come on any time I used the watch, the Vertix’s battery life barely moved when I wasn’t exercising. As a result you’ll get through two weeks without charging even if logging GPS activities daily, and if you don’t exercise every day or mostly workout indoors, you’ll go three weeks or more without needing a top-up. Superb.

Where Can I Wear It Without People Laughing At Me?

I rate the design of the Vertix highly and would have no problem wearing it anywhere. It’s similar – very similar, in fact – to Garmin’s Fenix line, and you can swap the 22mm bands easily. Although Coros only sells silicone options itself, you can find 22m bands made from other materials that will fit the watch.

The design of the Vertix differs from the five-button set-up of Garmin and Polar devices, with just three buttons, one of which is also a scrollable knob. I’m a fan of scrolling – it makes navigating menus and your stat screens easier. Interacting with the watch is a slick and intuitive experience, which can’t always be said for multisport watches laden with features and endless menus. You can also flip the orientation of the screen so the wheel is on the right or left side, putting it in a natural position whichever wrist you wear the Vertix on.

We love the Coros Apex watch, to the point where we awarded it our Coach Approved tag owing to its winning combination of reliable sports tracking, monster battery life and low price – the Apex 46mm costs £299.99 and the Apex 42mm costs £269.99.

So we were understandably excited when the news hit our inbox that Coros was launching a premium version of the Apex – the Apex Pro. The new watch will sit between the Apex and the Vertix mountain watch in Coros’s line-up, although at £459.99 the Apex Pro is a sizeable step up in price from the standard Apex.

The Apex Pro adds an extra button and has a bigger knob, which you twirl to navigate its menus. It also adds touchscreen functionality, but only in certain instances, like when you’re using the Apex to follow a breadcrumb trail.

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• The Best Running Watches Of 2021
• Coros Apex Review: A Premium Multisport Watch For Under £300
• Coros Pace Fitness Tracker Review

Coros has also increased the battery life on the Apex Pro to 40 hours of GPS, up from 35 hours on the Apex 46mm (the Apex Pro only comes in the larger size), and added a pulse oximeter to measure your blood oxygen saturation. This last feature will mainly be of use to adventurous types who frequently find themselves at high altitudes, because it will help you gauge how well you’re acclimatising.

That’s about it in terms of headline updates to the watch, which does mean that if you’ve already invested in the Apex, there’s not really enough there to justify trading up for the new Pro version.

However, for those still deciding on what sports watch to go for, the Apex Pro adds another option to rival the best from Garmin, Polar and Suunto. Coros’s devices don’t have the deep array of features available on other watches, Garmin’s and Polar’s in particular, but they are easy to use and they cover everything runners and triathletes could need in an attractive package.

Preview on Coros

Three features make the Coros Apex stand out. It looks good; the battery lasts for 35 hours of GPS tracking; and it costs less than £300. Although it suffered some heart rate accuracy problems during our testing and it lacks a couple of features common among other watches, the Apex is an impressive fitness tracker that runners and triathletes in particular should consider.

If you’re a triathlete then the Apex is the best available for under £300, but runners are better served by the Garmin Forerunner 245 Music (£299.99), which lacks a multisport mode but has space for music and offers better all-round sports tracking, even if its battery life isn’t as good as on the Apex.

Garmin has also recently reduced the RRP of the Garmin Forerunner 935 multisport watch to £389.99 – still a fair bit more than the Apex, but it’s a far better sports tracker. The Garmin 735XT is also usually available for well under £300 and although it’s getting on a bit now, it’s still an excellent multisport watch.

Coros regularly updates the Apex with new features, so you can expect some gaps to be filled in the next few months including more sports modes and structured workouts, but relying on updates arriving is not ideal when you’re spending £250 to £300. The safe bet is one of the Garmins (it always is) but the Coros watch’s ease of use, massive battery and smart looks make it a worthy option.

Running With The Coros Apex

Right off the bat let’s give Coros plaudits for allowing up to six stats on each of the five screens you can swipe between when you’re running. Sure, most people probably don’t need that many, but it’s nice to have the option. You have to set up your in-run data screens in the partner app rather than on the Apex itself, which is a small annoyance, but most of us will only need to do this once.

Alongside all the standard stats like time, distance and pace, Coros offers a few more advanced stats, the most interesting of which is stamina. This provides a live take on how much energy you have left while running, with a percentage that drops as you run. Helpfully this stamina reading is also available when not exercising, so you can check on how quickly your stores are being replenished between runs.

Most GPS watches now have some kind of recovery tracking feature and other companies like Polar go into far more depth than Coros on this front, but there’s a compelling simplicity to the stamina measurement. If you’re on a run and wondering if you should push on for one more kilometre, you can check your stamina reading to see whether it will completely empty your reserves. But it’s probably more useful before you even step out of the door. When you’re deciding between an easy run or an interval session, a quick look at your stamina might be a handy way to tell if you’ve got the juice for a tough workout.

Of course that’s only if you believe that the stamina measurement is an accurate take on your energy. Unfortunately we found that the Coros Apex wasn’t particularly accurate in tracking our heart rate during runs, which threw the stamina reading out of whack.

For most runs the Apex would track accurately enough (compared with a chest strap reading) at first, but after ten or 15 minutes the reading would start to climb and settle at around 160 or 170bpm, well into my red zone and far higher than the reading on the chest strap. At other times the reading would just be consistently 20-25bpm too high throughout a run. On occasion it would be spot-on for the entire run, but these occasions became fewer and farther between throughout the test period.

This also affects the aerobic and anaerobic training effect given for each workout, because the watch thinks you’re working in a higher heart zone than you are. Broadly speaking, most of your training should be aerobic running in the lower three heart rate zones to build your fitness and general stamina, while more intense anaerobic efforts in the zones four and five can help build you speed endurance.

The Coros Apex is big on aerobic and anaerobic training, offering guided workouts based on these two areas as well as a live reading of aerobic and anaerobic training effect. If you pair a chest strap with the watch (ANT+ only, Bluetooth straps are not supported), this could be a compelling way to make sure you get the desired effect from your session, although a better explainer of aerobic and anaerobic running in the app to get people using the guided workouts would be helpful.

If you want to set up your own simple workout there is an intervals function within the running mode, but you can’t get any more complex than basic on/off repeats. Coros has told us structured workouts will come to the watch in a future update, though there’s no confirmed date for this.

One update that has arrived on the watch since its launch, however, is breadcrumb navigation. It’s easy to get a route on to the Apex – either create one from a past workout or open a .GPX file in the app. You can get a .GPX file using pretty much any online route creator and make them from Strava routes. Once it’s in the app and synced to the watch, you get a basic pointer plus trail to follow when running. And if you get lost during a run you can also turn on the back-to-start pointer to guide you home.

The battery life on the Apex 46mm really is fantastic. American ultrarunner Camille Herron recently used it while breaking the 24-hour distance record and still had 32% of juice left afterwards. We found that we’d get through about half the battery in a busy week of running every day combined with the odd cycle commute. If you’re training three or four times a week you could comfortably get through three weeks without having to charge it.

Cycling With The Coros Apex

The main change from running to cycling with the Apex is what data fields are on offer. You lose stamina and training effect (a shame because stamina especially would be useful on long rides), but gain several different power options (you’ll need to connect a separate sensor to the watch for this), as well as a real-time estimation of the grade of hill you’re on.

Cyclists heading for a long ride will probably be even more delighted by the battery life on the Apex than runners, and may not suffer the same problems with heart rate tracking. Although I ran more than I rode with it, and generally stayed at a lower intensity when cycling, the Apex proved more accurate in the saddle. All the same, I’d still suggest you’d need to link it to an external heart rate monitor if you wanted accurate heart rate tracking for cycling sessions.

Sports Tracking With The Coros Apex

When it first launched the Apex only tracked running, cycling and swimming, or a combination of those sports, but Coros has now added more sports modes to the watch. These include hiking, a dedicated trail run mode, plus indoor and outdoor general cardio modes. This still falls well short of what you’ll get on Garmin, Polar or Suunto watches, but it will probably suffice for runners and triathletes who just want to keep a general log of their cross-training, especially as you can re-label the cardio modes more precisely once they’re synced over to Strava. The outdoor cardio modes uses GPS and will record distance and speed, while the indoor mode mainly just records time elapsed, heart rate and calories burned.

Activity Tracking With The Coros Apex

The Apex tracks your everyday activity, giving steps, active energy (calories burned while active), exercise time and floors climbed. This information is available by scrolling up or down from your main watch face, which can also display some of your daily activity stats depending on which of the five watch faces available you choose.

Everyday tracking isn’t really the focus of the Apex, so the above will more than cover what most would expect from it, although an alert to move if inactive for long periods would be useful. The heart rate tracking when not exercising is also not continuous, with the Apex taking a reading every ten minutes.

Sleep Tracking On The Coros Apex

You’ll see no sleep tracking section most of the time in the Coros app, which is because your data only pops up when you have actually worn the Apex at night. The next morning you’ll get a graph plotting your heart rate against a background colour-coded to show the time spent in deep sleep, light sleep or awake. You’re also given the total time spent in each, along with an average heart rate. There are no recommendations for getting better sleep and the Apex won’t identify any trends in your sleep, which some other devices are able to do, but it’s a solid offering and the Apex is comfortable enough to wear at night.

The Coros App

Just as the device itself doesn’t go overboard with stats and menus, things are kept pretty simple in the app as well. On the home screen there are graphs of your daily activity like steps and active energy plotted over time, along with info on your training load and general fitness stats like VO2 max and resting heart rate.

This section also includes an estimate of your threshold running pace, which is roughly the pace you could sustain for 50-60 minutes. Any watch’s rating of your VO2 max and threshold pace should be taken with a pinch of salt, and trends in those stats are far more useful than the raw numbers themselves. However, the Coros stats seemed to jump around more than I’ve experienced on other trackers, and the threshold pace and VO2 max ratings were wildly optimistic for me. The former was given as 2min 48sec per kilometre, which is a pace I could maintain for under five minutes, rather than 50-60. So while it’s interesting to see how the Coros rates you and worth keeping an eye on any changes to your stats, I wouldn’t go bragging about them to too many people if I were you.

The app also has a tab for your workout history, with all the usual info on your runs, rides and swims, and a tab dedicated to your watch, where you can update it and set up your data screens. You can also add watch faces to the watch from here – five are allowed on the Apex itself in total, so you can swap in other picks for the default quintet if desired.

Battery Life

As you’ve no doubt gathered from the above, not very often. With regular use, tracking some kind of outdoor activity every day, you’ll get through two weeks without a charge, and if your training is less frequent you’ll fly past the three-week mark. The Apex 46mm uses its larger frame to pack a slightly better battery life than the Apex 42mm, but the latter will still last for 25 hours of GPS use compared with the 46mm’s 35 hours.

Design

The Apex has a simple, smart design that makes it suitable for wearing everywhere. It looks and feels like a premium device, and the silicone band is comfortable to wear all the time. You can choose between a silver or a black bezel on the watch, and there are seven colour bands available if you want to replace the default black. It would be nice to have the option of different materials in the bands, with leather or metal options for when you’re not exercising, but that’s hardly essential.

Coros Pace In Brief

Coros has its sights firmly set on Garmin with the launch of the Pace, a multisport GPS watch that offers triathletes everything they need to track their training for £250. That’s not quite cheap enough to make the Pace stand out due to its slightly limited feature set, but its impressively easy-to-use interface and frankly mahoosive 25-hour battery life when tracking with GPS makes it worthy of your consideration.

£250, buy on amazon.co.uk

RECOMMENDED: The Best Fitness Trackers

Coros Pace In Depth

Using The Coros Pace For Running

Aside from the current lack of an intervals mode, which is due to arrive this summer, the Coros Pace offers runners of all levels pretty much everything they need. Stats are clearly displayed on the screen mid-run and your heart rate is shown with a colour-coded gauge to show which zone you’re in (yes, like Garmin does – that is very much a theme). You can have up to five data screens with three customised stats on each (the duration of your run is always on screen at the bottom). These have to be set up on the partner app though, so no changes on the fly if you leave your phone behind.

The Pace was reliably fast in locating a GPS signal at the start of a run – I’d say 30 seconds at most, which puts it up there with the best that I’ve tried, perhaps because it uses BDS satellites (the Chinese system) as well as the standard GPS and GLONASS.

More advanced running features include cadence stats and alerts to keep you within a target cadence. There’s also a metronome to help guide you to the cadence you’re aiming for. You can also set the Pace to alert you when you’re in a certain heart rate zone, which can help ensure you’re not working too hard or slacking off.

During the run I found the current pace metric too inconsistent to use for accurate pacing. It’s better to use your lap alerts and average pace, because current pace tends to jump up and down constantly even if you’re running at a seemingly steady pace. That’s true with most GPS watches to be fair – it’s very hard to get accurate instant pace when they’re connecting to satellites. The best thing you can do if you want accurate current pace is get a footpod, but even that won’t be 100% spot on.

What was slightly more concerning was that the Pace seemed to slightly underestimate the distance on every run, compared with a couple of other watches (one connected to a footpod) and one official race distance. But as with current pace, you can never expect complete accuracy with GPS, and if I wasn’t always wearing two or three trackers like a dweeb I wouldn’t have noticed the difference with the Coros Pace.

One area where the Pace impressed with its accuracy was heart rate tracking. It matched a chest strap beat for beat on easy runs, and when I did a sprint intervals session there was less lag in reading my heart rate spikes on the Pace than on a watch connected to a chest strap. Heart rate accuracy with a watch can differ by person, but I found the Pace to be absolutely top-notch.

After the run, the info syncs rapidly with the Coros app and is well presented on one scrolling screen. There are graphs for pace, cadence, elevation and heart rate (colour-coded), along with lap stats and the total time spent in different heart rate zones. lt might lack some of the in-depth detail you’d get from a higher-end watch in the Garmin app, but in truth everything 99% of runners will need is right there and presented superbly.

RECOMMENDED: The Best Running Watches

Using The Coros Pace For Cycling

The cycling mode on the Coros Pace is very similar to the running one. You get up to five screens of data fields but tailored to cycling, which means speed instead of pace, for example. There’s a dedicated screen of elevation data including a measure of the steepness of the grade you’re currently cycling on – a good stat to have to hand when you’re bragging about the hills you climbed on your ride.

You will be able to connect to separate sensors via both ANT+ and Bluetooth, including power meters, but this wasn’t a feature available at the time of review. It should be available by the end of June.

Using The Coros Pace For Swimming

There are sports modes for pool and open-water swimming on the Pace, the latter essential for a triathlon watch, and both give an impressive level of detail on your activity. In the pool you can set the length to a minimum of 15m and you get a solid array of live data, including distance, average pace, and lap time and pace. The device will also attempt to track your heart rate in the water, but this is not easy and I’d say the results weren’t really accurate enough for me to take much notice of.

After you get out of the pool you get more dedicated swimming stats like SWOLF and stroke rate in the app, and the Pace is also smart enough to reliably recognise your stroke each lap. Again, aside from an intervals mode, the Pace offers everything you’d want from a swim tracker.

I didn’t test the Pace in open water, but the device offers similar stats to in the pool, plus a GPS map of your swim, and you can also set a stroke rate alert on the watch, a useful way to ensure you’re keeping your pace up.

RECOMMENDED: The Best Waterproof Fitness Trackers

Using The Coros Pace To Track Activity

While the Pace is primarily designed to track sports, it will make a decent fist of recording your daily activities. It even puts your daily step count and active calories burned on the watch face (which can’t be changed – sorry, customisation fans). In the partner app there are graphs of your active calories, exercise time, steps and heart rate over the course of the day. You can’t then see these stats in context over a week, month or year, though.

Using The Coros Pace As A Heart Rate Monitor

Wear the Pace at all times and you’ll get a graph of your heart rate throughout the day and night, with the high and low points of each 24-hour period picked out. You won’t, however, be given an estimation of your resting heart rate, which is a shame because it’s a useful measure of your overall fitness. A VO2 max score is set to arrive on the watch in June, which is probably more useful to sporty types than resting heart rate, but there’s no reason I can think of for the Pace not to have both.

As mentioned in the running section the Pace is impressively accurate at recording your heart rate during activities and you can set an alert to keep you in a certain heart rate zone.

RECOMMENDED: The Best Heart Rate Monitors

The Coros App

It’s taken the likes of Fitbit and Garmin years to refine their apps, so I give Coros a lot of credit for an app which is pretty great straight out of the gate. There are four tabs in the app: one has your daily activity stats, the next is your sport history, the third is your profile (which includes medals for various sporting achievements and an overall tally of your running, riding and swimming) and the final tab is the Coros Pace page, where you can edit settings on the watch.

All very logical and all very easy to use. That theme continues with the stats on each individual activity. One scrolling page with all the data laid out in simple, attractive fashion. You can also link the app with Strava, but you’ll have to wait for other apps to be supported. Some, like MapMyRun and TrainingPeaks, will be added in June but there’s no info on others as yet.

How Often Am I Going To Have To Charge It?

I’m getting excited just thinking about the battery life on the Coros Pace (I may need to get out more).The 25 hours of GPS puts it in the same league as top-end Garmin and Suunto trackers that cost nearly £500, and Coros has also promised a GPS Eco mode that will sacrifice some accuracy to deliver 40 hours of slightly less precise GPS tracking. That will be useful for ultrarunners, but for most people 25 hours will be plenty.

In my experience, the first charge on the Coros comfortably lasted a couple of weeks when I was running most days and occasionally cycling or swimming. I was wearing the Pace throughout the day the first week and then just for sports afterwards. If you opt for the latter approach, I reckon you might squeeze three weeks out of the battery.

Where Can I Wear It Without People Laughing At Me?

The Pace isn’t horrendously ugly, but it is very clearly a sports watch and the plasticky design will put most off wearing it when not training. It is lightweight and comfortable to wear but it doesn’t have the style of a Fitbit, or the newer Garmins and Suuntos, which are better bets for all-day wear.

Should I Consider Buying Something Else?

This is a bit tricky. At £200 the Coros Pace would be a slam dunk and for £250 it’s still a great price for a full triathlon watch. However, there is competition from the Suunto Spartan Trainer Wrist HR, which is also a multisport watch and has an RRP of £239 (and often costs considerably less on Amazon). I prefer the Coros, even before you consider the substantially better battery life (25 hours of GPS compared with the Suunto’s 10), but the Suunto has better navigation features and more sports modes. You can also usually find the Garmin Forerunner 735XT for £250 (check Amazon), another great triathlon watch with a wider feature set than the Coros Pace. It has a lot more features, in fact, including advanced running analysis, but only 16 hours of GPS battery life.

There are, in short, other great trackers that have more features than the Coros, if not the battery life, at a similar price or cheaper. However, the Coros will get updates to address some of those features, and the lack of features is, in a way, part of the charm because it is so easy to use. If you’re a runner or a triathlete who enjoys simplicity and hates charging things, give the Coros Pace serious consideration.

£250, buy on amazon.co.uk