There was a time not too long ago when the great monolithic player in the smart watch game was Garmin. The big G makes many things with great detail and care, from satellite phones to airplane navigation systems to… watches. Some of the younger brands in the space have entered with a more specific focus, and COROS is among them. They put a lot of effort into user experience and intuitive design. That shows itself in one of the company’s latest additions to their line-up: the NOMAD.
COROS NOMAD Features:
- High-contrast memory-in-pixel (MIP) display
- Dual-frequency GPS, global maps with street names, waypoints and save locations are all powered by the Gen 3 processor for faster, more responsive mapping
- Lightweight body, dual-layer aluminum and polymer bezel, hardened mineral glass, and 50-meter water resistance provide real-world durability in all kinds of conditions
- Battery life lasts up to 50 hours in All-Systems GPS mode and up to 22 days in standard use
- Built-in barometer, altimeter and compass for improved navigation and elevation tracking
- Features a wide range of activity modes and third-party integrations
- The COROS app (iOS & Android) and Training Hub (web portal) allow you to track your progress, analyze your performance metrics, and build customized training plans
- Adventure Journal lets you record voice pins with a noise-cancelling microphone and save your favorite locations for activities
- Upload photos, videos and voice pins to attach directly to your GPS track to the COROS app
- Included USB-C keychain charging adapter
- Display Size: 1.3”
- MSRP: $349
The 30,000 Foot View
While many activity-centric smartwatches are built around running, the NOMAD is decidedly a generalist. It has some new activity features surrounding fishing, yes, but it’s as much running ready as it is hiking ready as it is ski touring ready, and so on. Honestly, the list of different potential activities to continue that sentence is overwhelming. There are 52 potential activity modes on the watch at the time that I write this review. I’ll be honest here… I regularly use about 6 of those. Still, the watch is ready to take on your sport of choice, both by nature of software and hardware.
The NOMAD has a simple, rugged aesthetic to it. It’s not G-Shock gaudy and it’s not quite Skagen stripped down and sleek. Height wise, it sits 14.8mm off the wrist, which neither looks nor feels bulky, in my opinion. The screen is a perfectly adequate 33mm. Larger screens strike me as a little too Flava Flav, while screens in the 26mm and under group feel a little too crammed. Dimensions are exactly what I’d hope for in a multi-sport smart watch, and the aesthetics feel pretty well tailored to the crowd too.
Though the screen is scratch resistant hardened mineral glass, its primary defense is the bezel, which sits elevated above the screen by about 2mm. That difference in height means that the majority of collisions which the screen might otherwise be subjected to are taken sacrificially by the bezel. With a top layer of plastic and a lower layer of aluminum, I’ve found that the bezel can take the abuse too. I’ve clocked it into more than a few things while climbing and mountain trail running, and while the bezel itself has some knicks and scratches, the screen has been entirely spared up to this point. Design wise, the elevated bezel is a crucial piece of the watch’s overall durability.
Comfort-wise, the bulk of the work is done by the NOMAD’s band. It comes with a silicon band, and nylon bands are available as an add-on at checkout. I’ve used the silicon band in my testing over the past 6 months, and it’s been generally comfortable overall. It stretches and bends well when you’re fitting it, and there are plenty of adjustment holes at sensibly close intervals, so getting the Goldilocks fit isn’t too difficult. My one qualm with the silicon band is that it really isn’t breathable. Unfortunately, that does mean that if you have the watch on more or less 24/7 and you have it relatively snug, you may end up getting some skin irritation over time. I have on and off, and have switched it to the other wrist for a couple weeks over the testing period to help abate that. Generally though, it’s quite comfortable.
Living with the NOMAD
The NOMAD is my first COROS watch, so when I started into the setup process, I was doing the whole thing. I had to create an account, download an app, fill out a smattering of bio data, etc… All that to say, I was spared no setup step and was in no way given an expedited experience. After all that, my genuine thought is this: basic setup is pretty streamlined. Account creation and pairing your watch with your phone are the biggest steps, and they just don’t take that much time or effort. It took me about 15 minutes.
Where things started to take a lot more time was activity setup. When I saw the 52-long list of activities, my eyes started to cross. I moved the ones that I thought I’d use most to the top of the list, then hid the activities I knew I’d never use. From there, it was time to set up activity data pages – the screens you see when you are in the middle of the activity itself. Each activity comes with preset activity data pages, but you also have the option to customize them. After spending quite a bit of time doing just that, my retrospective recommendation would be this: get the activities you know you’ll use all the time exactly how you want them. Forget about the rest for the time being. Revisit them when it becomes necessary. Otherwise, you have a long and overwhelming task ahead of you.
After the setup was long forgotten, I just got used to the daily rhythms of the watch, figuring out the settings I liked or wanted to turn off, and becoming comfortable with the navigation of its features. One thing has stuck out to me throughout testing, and that’s the buttons. The upper right, dial-style button is the main power player. It gets used for most everything regarding activities and navigation, and the lower right button fills a similar role for features and settings. The lower left button, however, is less of a star player. Within activities, it can be configured to switch to navigation mode or drop pins or a couple other options, but outside of activities, it really doesn’t get used. I’d say there’s a strong case for it not being necessary at all. That’s not so much a critique as an observation of an oddity.
The COROS App and Features
More than anything else, I value ease of use in an app. I don’t require many fancy bells and whistles. For the most part though, the COROS app delivers on both fronts – simplicity and features. Within the app, you can do a wide variety of things from adjusting notification or unit settings on your watch to creating workout plans with notifications. More than anything else, I’ve returned to the app for a clear visualization of where I am in my mileage and training load for the week and how my intensity trend is stacking up against my goals.
What I’ve found throughout my use of the app is that metrics, summaries, and reasonable, data-based suggestions are very easy to find. They’re also bountiful in their variety, but, as a rule, not so configurable. For instance, I’m training for a 50K this coming Spring, and I really care about my weekly running mileage. I’d like to be able to see that total weekly running mileage compared against prior weeks. That kind of thing would help me ensure that I’m following the right training trend mileage-wise. While I can get this kind of data by flipping from one page to another, I don’t have a way to configure it myself in a personal report or chart. The interactive metrics and summaries within the app are excellent out-of-the-box, but I wouldn’t mind a little additional configurability.
One place where there’s configurability in spades is the actual watch face design. There appear to be hundreds of them. Certainly there are too many digital watch face options for me to scroll through each and make an informed choice on which one I want. Many of them are too loud or cluttered with data for my taste, but some are more understated. Since the standard NOMAD watch face is not offensive to me, I’ve just stuck with it. It might be a different story if there were fewer watch face options than there are stars in the sky.
One feature I keep turning to the app for is creating new navigation routes. You can create routes directly with a simple interactive interface very much akin to Map My Run. The in-app route creator takes into account known trail use restrictions though. For instance, when I was charting out some future runs on a local trail system, the app prevented me from setting my route on downhill mountain biking trails. It’s a super handy feature, if you ask me, and can prevent some on-the-fly re-routing. Besides manually creating new routes, you can also open existing GPX files in the COROS app, which is super handy for trail races and mountaineering.
With activities completed and synced to the app (a quick, automatic process), you can review through your activity in a variety of ways, tracking elevation over time and even sharing 3D GPS track fly-over videos. It’s very cool, especially for long trail runs in the mountains. New with the NOMAD specifically is the Adventure Journal functionality, which allows you to upload photos, notes, and voice memos to those same activities. After a 19-hour day climbing in the Cascades, I added 22 photos to the associated activity record. They all uploaded exactly according to their timestamp and showed themselves in the activity track at those points in time, which was cool. But… it also made the activity very, very laggy in the app – nearly non-responsive. Something to be aware of.
The NOMAD for Running, Climbing, and Everything Else
All the features, design, and tech talk in the world doesn’t address the end goal of a watch like this. It’s all about the tool in action. Over my ~5 ½ month long-term testing period, I used the NOMAD for a wide variety of activities. Too many to touch on each in great detail. Instead, I’ll focus on using the NOMAD for some of my top activities, Running, Climbing, and Hiking/Walking.
First and foremost, smart watches benefit a runner. In the best scenario, they’re easy to forget about as you’re going, and you get loads of actionable data. My experience with the NOMAD has met that expectation exactly. It’s very comfortable, and I’m more in tune with my heart rate zones than I ever have been before. That’s allowed me to tailor workouts more strategically and adjust my cadence on the fly to line up with my goals for the day’s run. As I’ve been ramping up mileage these past few months in preparation for a spring-time 50K, that data has been more helpful than ever. The race time predictions are laughably off-base (very slow for the shorter distances and achievable in the longer ones). That said, all the other data is well grounded and generally helpful.
I’ve already touched on creating navigation routes, but actually using them on the watch has been a Godsend. I’ve been going on longer runs, which has pushed me to trail systems I’m less familiar with, and I make a habit of charting my routes beforehand to make sure I’m getting the right mileage and not getting lost somewhere in the deep, dark woods… a definite possibility. When I queue up a route I’ve created, the watch gives me a vibrate notification each time I’m approaching a turn in my course, gives me a visual of where I am in my charted route, and lets me know the distance I have until my next turn. It is awesome and has exceptional potential for mountain running come summertime.
The only negative note that I have on the NOMAD’s navigation is that the GPS can sometimes be slightly off between your charted routes and the actual locations of trails. When that’s the case, the watch will keep notifying you that you are off route. Handy in most circumstances, these extra pings can be annoying when you see your little dot moving parallelly ~15 feet to the right of where the watch thinks the trail is… This has happened perhaps 4 or 5 times during the testing period, but it is slightly bothersome nonetheless.
I’ve taken the NOMAD out climbing in every conceivable discipline, from bouldering to sport, trad to aid, big multi-pitch walls to ice. In the climbing department, I have a few notes. For Bouldering, you have to manually start, stop, then recorded grades for each problem. It can be a bit of a herky-jerky experience, and personally took me out of my usual flow of things. When it comes to recording grades, the watch has most of the scales you might find useful (no clean aid, alpine ice, or mixed aid/free grading by pitch). Its terminology for attempts and sends is sometimes irrelevant to the type of climbing you’re doing though. For instance, “Red Point” is an option when you’re recording your Bouldering activity.
Within the more general Climbing activity mode, things are a bit more robust, but still imperfect. Laps can initiate automatically when you start climbing and can stop automatically if you take a fall or lower down the pitch. That feels much more natural, and helps with the flow quite a bit. There are limitations for multipitch climbing though. Most folks won’t run into it, but there’s a maximum of 16 pitches you can record at one time. You can get around that limit by starting another lap once after 16 pitches, but it’s not a smooth experience. I climbed the 26-pitch Infinite Bliss this past August, and I ran into that limit. I wasn’t aware of the limit, so it didn’t allow me to record some of the pitches I’d climbed. Nonetheless, if you know beforehand, you can plan your recording ahead of time.
The final note I have on the topic of climbing is that the COROS Apex has an optional carabiner attachment. That is super handy, and the NOMAD should have that too. In fact, I suspect users of all of COROS’ models would be enthusiastic for a carabiner add-on. It would certainly be a convenient addition for trad climbers, who regularly have to stow their watch. You can’t exactly wear a watch while shoving your mitts deep in a crack.
I’ll give brief mention to mountain biking, hiking, and walking before moving on here. For mountain biking, and any be-gloved sport, if you’re wearing the watch with the dial facing your wrist (as most right handed folks will do), your gloves are likely to turn the dial as you ride, incessantly flipping your watch from one activity data page to another. With remarkable frequency when I was riding my bike, I’d glance down to check my heart rate and find that the dial had spun under the influence of my glove and switched to my elevation and distance data page. I wish there were a way to lock the activity data pages, because that does get a little old.
On the hiking and walking front, the watch is great! More than anything else, I found it useful as a general check-in on mileage. Several times though, its navigation features and built in compass were instrumental. With handy features like these on the wrist all the time, I pull out my phone or map less frequently. I’ve really appreciated that.
The Battery
The battery matters for an outdoors-focused smart watch. If it can’t handle extended periods of time using GPS tracking, it’s just not worth that much to me. My experience with the battery has been generally good. Over the course of the testing period (170 days as I write this), I have charged the watch 8 times and am 18% away from charging it a 9th time. That works out to an average 21+ days per charge before the watch kicked the bucket at 0%. Each day, I’m using the NOMAD consistently and with rare exception, have at least one activity logged. For the amount I’ve used the NOMAD daily, 21+ day average charge is pretty impressive.
With that said, some features take more of a toll on the batter than others. Within the first charge cycle, I identified one such sucker: the gesture backlight setting. Some will find that feature worthwhile, but it reduced my battery life to 12 days, so I turned it off. Significant GPS usage will also reduce battery life, but less markedly. I’ve still gotten north of 19 days on a charge when I use GPS features heavily in a charge cycle. That’s pretty good, if you ask me.
Something I’ve found notable about the NOMAD is that when the battery gets low, you get notifications. The watch will start to tell you to charge it whenever you press a button. At 2% battery life and below, the Nomad refuses to do anything but tell time. If you’re mid-activity, your activity will stop and be unavailable to resume. You’ll just have the watch face with the time and whatever other metrics are there. No navigation, no activities, no fancy features – just time. I’ve run into that wall a couple of times while out hiking or running, and it’s inconvenient. I understand the idea – saving battery for the most critical function. Still, it may present an issue if you’re really relying on the navigation. As with most things, best to be prepared with all your devices charged beforehand, I suppose.
Charging itself is quite easy too. I’ve timed the 0-100% charge process at 1 hour and 2 minutes. I imagine that differing power sources will tweak that number in one direction or another. Regardless, if about 1 hour of charging consistently gets me about 21 days of use, I’m a pretty happy camper.
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The Bottom Line
Does-it-all
The COROS NOMAD is meant to be a do-it-all adventure watch, and that’s exactly what it is. It has the features ready for a wide variety of activities and it’s easy to live with on the day-to-day, all while rocking an understated but rugged aesthetic. It’s comfortable, boasts some good averages in the battery life department, and has some navigation features that have genuinely made my life easier out on the trails. I have my nitpicks for certain activities’ settings, features, and terminology, certainly, but on the whole, I think this is an excellent watch, and a relative steal at $349 MSRP.
The Good:
- Great aesthetic and dimensions
- Elevated plastic and aluminum bezel protects the already scratch resistant screen well
- Initial setup and pairing is an easy 15 minute process
- Activity data pages are easy to customize to get the right data on-hand while you’re mid-activity
- COROS App is simple and easy to navigate
- Metrics and insights in the app abound
- Navigation route creation in the app and actual use in the watch are both very intuitive and clever
- Summaries and data-based insights are generally accurate and helpful
- 52 different activity options
- Automatic start/stop functionality for Climbing is effective and very slick
- I averaged 21+ days per charge on the Nomad with constant use, which is pretty great
The Bad:
- Overwhelming amount of watch face options
- All COROS watches should have a carabiner attachment as an optional add-on, like the Apex
- Sheer volume of potential features, activities, and metrics can feel overwhelming while customizing pages
- Adding photos to activities in the App can make the activities very laggy
- In instances where the GPS is slightly off on where a trail is, the navigation feature’s “Off-route” warnings get a little old
- Bouldering activity lacks natural flow and includes inaccurate terminology
- Climbing activity only allows you to log up to 16 pitches at one time, which can be limiting for big wall climbing
- Wearing gloves for activities like ice climbing and mountain biking spins the dial of the watch, endlessly flitting between activity data pages
- When the watch gets to 2% battery life, all activities and features are stopped, and the watch can only be used to tell time