A fine AMOLED debut from Coros
The Coros Pace Pro is a really strong addition to the Coros range and while it's more expensive than the Pace 3, it gives Coros a watch that can compete with fellow AMOLED midrange watches like the Polar Vantage M3, Garmin Forerunner 265 and the well-priced Suunto Race S. If you like the idea of a multisports watch that offers reliable sports tracking, a good quality AMOLED and matching that with strong battery life, the Pace Pro will appeal. if you're looking for the best sports watch and smartwatch in one, there's better options, but there's certainly more to like than not like here with the Pace Pro.
Pros
- Good quality AMOLED screen
- Battery life performance
- Strong mapping, heart rate and GPS tracking
Cons
- Training analysis needs to feel more glanceable
- It's more expensive than the Pace 3
- Smartwatch features are fine but not best in class
It was only a matter of time before we’d see a Coros watch with an AMOLED screen. The relative sports watch newcomer now joins Garmin, Polar and Suunto in offering a multisports watch that feels more smartwatch.
What is surprising is that the first Coros color joins the affordable Pace line. It lines up with the Pace 3 as another option for those who don’t want to spend over £500/$500 on a sports watch.
The Pace Pro isn’t just about the display. It adds features from Coros’ pricier watches, like the Vertix 2S and Apex 2 Pro. It’s a watch that will map and navigate you to your destination, includes the most advanced GPS smarts on offer and even squeezes in an ECG sensor.
The result is another feature-packed option from Coros that will once again be giving the established sports watch players something to worry about.
Price and competition
While the Pace Pro has Pace in the name and does sit at the more affordable end of the Coros range, it’s not as cheap as the Pace 3 or previous Pace watches.
The Pace Pro sits at £329/$349, which is a jump from the £219/$229 price attached to the Coros Pace 3. That moves it more into mid-range sports watch territory where it’s competing with likes of the Suunto Race S (£325/$349), Polar Vantage M3 (£349/$399) and the Garmin Forerunner 265 (£429//$449).
It’s worth mentioning that you can currently find the Forerunner 265 for below £400/$400, so it’s now more in keeping with those other mid-range options including the Pace Pro.
All of those rival watches include AMOLED screens, the latest GPS technology, though the 265 lacks the same full mapping support you’ll find on the Pace Pro, Race S and the Vantage M3.
Design and display
The Pace Pro’s look is very much in keeping with the Pace 3 and the Pace 2 giving you a predominantly polymer look with a pick of silicone or nylon removable straps. It’s also waterproof up to 50 metres depth to make it built for pool and open water swims.
Compared to the Pace 3, it’s a noticeably bigger watch with its 46mm-sized case that comes in blue, black or grey shades. The Pace 3 is definitely available in more colourful looks, but we found the blue version offered a pleasant enough and wouldn’t be surprised to see the Pace Pro get more colours given Coros does typically add more colour options.
Coros sticks to offering just two physical buttons like its other watches, with its rotating dial in the top right corner with a larger, flatter button below that. If you’re used to a sports watch with more buttons, then it might take a little adjusting to. If you’re typically used to using a smartwatch or a traditional watch, then getting to grips with the Pace Pro is going to be fine.
The big talking point of course is the display, which is a 1.3-inch, 416 x 416 AMOLED with always-on display mode, and is covered with mineral glass to offer protection against scratches. It bangs out at 1,500 nits and you can adjust brightness levels from the watch settings.
To put the Pace Pro’s screen into perspective from a size and resolution perspective, the Garmin Forerunner 265 features a 1.3-inch, 416 x 416 AMOLED, while the Polar Vantage M3 hosts a 1.28-inch, 416 x 416 resolution AMOLED screen. So it’s very much in keeping with the competition. In terms of performance, we’ve used it for indoor and outdoor runs during the day and at night. We’ve used it in the gym and for swims as well.
The screen performance in all testing scenarios has been excellent overall with no issues to report. Those deep blacks you associate with strong quality AMOLED screens are there, as are the punchy colors and the level of brightness it can achieve, even when not at its maximum brightness setting, has been very good.
At the rear of the watch, it all feels very Coros. You’ve got a similar optical sensor array to the one included on its Apex 2 Pro alongside a charging port, which looks exactly the same as all other Coros watches, but is actually slightly different.
That’s meant a change in charging setup with Coros ditching the plug it straight into the cable method for a keychain-style charger that you’ll need to find a USB-C to plug into because one isn’t provided in the box.
Battery life
As we’ve mentioned with other AMOLED sports watches, the challenge for the likes of Coros has been to get the battery life on the Pace Pro to respectable levels. Using Pace Pro, you don’t feel like you’re making huge sacrifices in stamina when getting a more colorful display. AMOLED drains battery quicker than the memory LCD displays that all other Coros watches possess. So, it’s about striking a balance.
Coros does thankfully manage to strike a good balance here, whether you’re choosing to keep the screen on at all times or you’re happy to raise your wrist to wake it and in the process get more battery life out of the Pace Pro.
Coros states you should get 20 days of daily use and sleep tracking, which drops to 6 days if you keep the screen turned on at all times. We found with the screen in always-on mode, tracking sleep daily metrics and using the GPS, the battery dropped 20%. Without any GPS use it was closer to 15%. When opting for the raise to wake mode with no GPS use, battery drop was as small as 5%.
When it’s time to put the GPS in use, the most accurate dual-frequency GPS mode promises up to 31 hours or 24 hours of battery depending on whether you keep that screen on. When we kept the screen on for an hour’s use, the battery drop was 4%.
With raise to wake, it was less. You can increase that GPS battery performance by opting for the all-systems mode (up to 38 hours), while adding music streaming into the mix significantly dents battery performance. It can be anywhere from 10-13 hours depending on the GPS accuracy mode you opt for as well.
Basically, the battery is good and in keeping with other mid-range sports watches. You’re not going to be charging it every few days, that’s for sure.
Sports tracking
Like other Coros watches, the Pace Pro is built to track multiple sports. It puts running, cycling, and swimming at the heart like other watches. But you can track winter sports like skiing with some indoor workouts including dedicated strength training and cardio modes on offer. If you’re looking for a not-super-expensive triathlon watch, it covers tracking for that too.
On that front, it matches cheaper Pace for sports modes and mainly misses out on the more climbing-centric ones available on the more expensive Apex 2 Pro. If you can live without that level of support, you’ll be happy with what the Pace Pro has to offer.
We’ve used the Pace Pro for a range of activities including treadmill runs, outdoor runs, indoor rows, general strength and conditioning work and for pool swims. The performance of the Pace Pro across the board has been strong and is one of the best-performing Coros watches we’ve tested.
We’ll start with the GPS accuracy, which when compared to Garmin, Apple and Polar’s own dual-band GPS modes performed extremely well for data like distance tracking, pace and split times along with offering good GPS tracks after too.
Heart rate performance is unsurprisingly a bit of a mixed bag. For most steady paced workouts, average and maximum heart rate ranges matched up well with a Polar heart rate monitor chest strap.
For some more high intensity sessions, like an interval track session, the data was a bit off with the average readings despite the graphs looking good in general. Coros does make it easy to pair up external sensors over Bluetooth having seemingly ditched support for ANT+. We paired the same Polar sensor and a Wahoo Trackr Heart Rate strap to it no problem.
For pool swims, the accuracy looked good as well too. We used it alongside another reliable swim tracking sports watch and the Form Swim 2 smart swimming goggles. A look at the data during and after swims showed that data like distance, lap counts and pace were all nicely in line.
Mapping and navigation
While Coros has introduced mapping to its latest Apex and Vertix watches, the Pace series has so far only enjoyed breadcrumb-style navigation with the ability to upload routes. Those features remain along with the very desirable addition of offline topographical and landscape maps. To get those maps you need to download them first and doing that is a relatively stress-free process. Go to the companion smartphone Coros app then into the map manager and select a section you want. It didn’t take achingly long to download the UK section of the map and then sync a section over to the watch.
From the watch you can view the map in landscape, topographical or a hybrid mode that offers a mixture of both. The rotating dial lets you zoom in and out of maps while you can swipe your fingers across the touchscreen to move to different areas of the map.
Unlike a lot of watches that offer similar mapping support, it doesn’t labor to refresh the map when you move to another area to explore. When you’re tracking you can add the mapping to your real-time data screens. If you want to use the turn-by-turn navigation features on offer, you’ll need to create or upload a route to the Coros app first to let the watch point you in the right direction or tell when you’re veering off course.
Viewing maps in general is great. The AMOLED screen can help identify things like bodies of water or greener areas and the vibrancy and overall brightness of the display made taking those maps easy to do day and night.
The level of mapping features outside of giving you a view isn’t vast, but it’s something we can live with for now and hope that Coros enhances the usefulness of maps going forward.
Training features and analysis
All sports watches now promise to go beyond just tracking. It wants to bring structure to your training and also offer the insight to make better decisions about training too.
Coros aims to offer plenty on that front. Jump into the tracking mode for activities like swims and you can set up interval-based workouts. You can set up a pacer for your runs while the Coros app lets you create workouts or download workouts from a library that Coros has created.
The Coros Pace Pro tracks training load, training status, and recovery time. For runners, there’s a running fitness score and a race predictor, which for us, felt realistically in tune with training and not widely optimistic or pessimistic.
There are also overnight HRV readings to accompany core sleep tracking that’s improved in terms of accuracy on previous Coros watches we’ve tested. The inclusion of an ECG sensor isn’t to tell you that it’s detected signs of atrial fibrillation. It’s about providing more accurate heart rate readings for its general wellness checks.
What we’d say about the mix of training features and insights you get is about presentation, both on and off the watch. Insights like training load and status felt in tune but is perhaps best presented on the app. Running fitness and predictions are nicely displayed on the watch. Creating basic interval workouts isn’t painful to do on the watch either, while you can view any created training plans easily on-screen too.
What we’d like to see is these things marry up a bit more on and off the watch. Make insights more glanceable, whether that’s through daily summaries or prompting you to pay attention to a particular part of your training. The nuts and bolts are there, it just all needs a bit of finessing.
Smartwatch features
If you’re hoping the Pace Pro will be the perfect mix of sports and smartwatch, that simply isn’t the case here. If you can live with some smartwatch staples, and those staples being delivered in a largely unfussy way, then you should be satisfied with what’s on offer here.
This is a watch that can display phone notifications when you swipe down from the watch face. You can also drag and drop audio onto it via a computer and then pair Bluetooth headphones to listen to music without your phone. Though, interestingly, Coros still doesn’t include music playback controls when streaming music from your phone.
There’s significantly more memory to play with than the Pace 3 (4GB) with the 32GB of storage matching what you actually get on the Apex 2 Pro. The feature works very similarly to the way it does on the Pace 3. The AMOLED and touchscreen definitely makes the controls nicer to use.
There’s some other extras here like the Find my phone mode, a pick of a few different watch faces, timers and the ability to use the Pro to remotely take smartphone pictures. We never felt hugely shortchanged using the Pace Pro as a smartwatch, but as we said, if you’re looking for the best combination of those smarts, you’re going to want to look in the direction of the Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch and Garmin’s similarly priced Forerunner series.
