The COROS PACE Pro GPS sports watch is the ultimate training tool for serious athletes wanting to monitor, track and optimize their performance. But, if you’re not into counting every calorie or optimizing your watts, VO2, SpO2, recovery, FTP, TL or a myriad of other acronyms, the PACE Pro is still a capable daily driver to track, in my case, my trail running, hiking and cycling workouts without requiring a PhD to do it.
COROS PACE Pro GPS Sports Watch Features:
- 1.3-inch AMOLED touchscreen with fast performance
- High-resolution 416×416 display
- 30x faster map and graphic rendering vs. APEX 2 Pro
- 2x Faster processor speed vs. PACE 3
- 38 hours of GPS activity tracking
- 20 days of daily use and sleep tracking (6 days with always-on display)
- Advanced optical heart rate and SpO2 (Blood Oxygen) monitor
- Global maps with turn-by-turn navigation
- Durable mineral glass screen
- MSRP: $349.00
Initial setup and experience
COROS makes fine training watches and bike computers. My recent review of the COROS DURA was my first foray into the brand and it left me impressed by its design, endless battery life and data visualization. The PACE Pro is a multi-sport watch that’s built to track athletic performance across a wide range of activities, but is mostly focused on running and cycling.
The beauty of the COROS ecosystem is how well everything works together. But, like any technology, there’s a lot of room for errors to creep in. For example, I’m still struggling to do firmware updates from my home WiFi, but can do it easily at my office. Honestly though, aside from that, the overall setup and performance has been excellent. I haven’t lost any activities or experienced any glitches during a single one.
The COROS mobile app isn’t as clean and refined as the Wahoo app, for example. But, the whole COROS platform (device and mobile app) is definitely better than Garmin’s offering, in my opinion (sorry Garmin fanboys). And, something that’s not possible on some platforms, you can modify the data pages during any activity. Yup, if you start a ride and realize you need another metric or screen, you can do that in the app and it syncs in real-time. You may not think this is a big deal until it is. Well-done, COROS!
Trail running companion
My top activity with the PACE Pro is definitely trail running. Accurately measuring my pace and watts are important metrics to measure my ongoing fitness. Throughout the summer, I’ve been able to consistently track each run, hike or walk and analyze the data. This is the PACE Pro’s sweet spot as it has all the running features anyone could want.
Notably, it wears well and feels lightweight while running. A simple flick of the wrist displays your chosen metrics with its bright AMOLED screen. Whatever you choose to display, it’s easy-to-read. Critical to me is my pace, distance and elevation gained. It’s easy to set up any number of activity screens to suit your needs.
After each run, the included summary on the device and in the COROS app are excellent — with maps and helpful details. After uploading to Strava, I appreciate the Athlete Intelligence provided through the extensive data. I’m talking power, cadence, step length and all the other features, like VO2 and training load. I love how much is packed into this watch from a runner’s perspective.
Something that’s a bit of a pet peeve here and with other watches is the unnecessary double-button click to actually immediately start an activity. This is due to not having GPS lock just yet. But, it only takes 5 seconds to lock on the GPS, the risk is losing a few seconds of me stretching at the car or in front of the garage before a ride. I get it, but just allow me to start the activity with one press — knowing that the GPS be seconds behind. I did lose half of one activity because I thought I had started it. And, it’s 2025, for goodness sake, if I partially start an activity, why can’t it auto-backtrack to where I opened it so I don’t lose part of my run?
And, I always mix up my activities, so I also have a nice hiking loop and dog walking loop that I have thrown in for variety of testing. After any activity, the quick summary offers a great overview of performance and it typically syncs with Strava in a hurry afterwards.
A cycling partner
For road and gravel riding, I always use a bike computer (like the COROS Dura), but for mountain biking, I always use a watch. Even though I ride with a head unit on the road/gravel, I always look for watches that can broadcast heart rate. Yes, I do love the Wahoo TRACKR Heart Rate strap, but it’s nice not to wear a chest strap and simply broadcast heart rate. With the PACE Pro, I can either broadcast the heart rate alone or simultaneously while recording any activity. It’s as simple as a long-press and enabling. From there, it pairs right up with various bike computers or my MacBook Pro for virtual MyWhoosh or Zwift sessions.
Most of my road/gravel testing was also done to compare distance and vert with various head units. No, they are never identical, but I’m confident in all the distance and elevation metrics I’ve seen coming from the PACE Pro. I paired the SRAM Red AXS power meters on my Cannondale SuperSix EVO and Open UPPER 2.0 just fine as a test, but kept them connected to my chosen head units. You can definitely pair up various accessories for added data capture if you wish.
When broadcasting heart rate, I do wish that it could automatically do that, or make it easier to access. It’s part of the endless dial of options when starting an activity and I would appreciate it being a little easier to do — or just auto-broadcast when I choose Road or Gravel activities.
For mountain biking, it’s the only tracker I’ve used all summer. It wears comfortably and provides just the right metrics at-a-glance. Of course, you can show various metrics to suit your tastes. Unlike the Suunto Race Watch, the PACE Pro wears comfortably over rough terrain and doesn’t dig into my wrist bones.
General livability and reliability
As mentioned, the PACE Pro is easy to live with. It wears comfortably day and night and offers excellent battery life (usually about two weeks for me). I appreciate the airy strap and find it comfortable to wear continuously for that full week of use. The hard plastic bezel has taken some abuse and shows no signs of wear at all. And, the mineral glass screen is scratch-free after several months of use/abuse.
As a sleep tracker, it’s good, but not class-leading. It tracks my sleep and calculates recover types. While other watches have a sleep summary, you have to scroll through your chosen health metrics to see your trends.
The AMOLED screen is awesome when it responds to wrist gestures. A wrist flick and the screen definitely rivals the super-bright Suunto Race Watch. However, I have found it finicky and most often requires exaggerated or multiple wrist flicks to get it to display — annoying when all you want to know is the time. I experimented with the always-on setting and it drains battery in a hurry (5-6 days), so I’ll stick with the battery-saving wrist-flick.
When the battery is low, there isn’t much of a warning. I’ve had it deplete overnight several times without knowing it was that low. It’s easy enough to check the battery life, but, as I said, I just charge it about every 10 days just to make sure. It’s really not a big deal.
There is a touch screen and it works well in concert with the typical COROS dial and action button. Most of the time, the swipe actions come in handy versus hitting the button. However, sometimes, there is no swipe option and other times (while showering), it can navigate to funny menus. Luckily, nothing terrible so far, but it does tend to go into download mode, which is oddly unintuitive to disable.
The PACE Pro has loads of features and data and my use just touches the surface. But, for my purposes, it’s been a reliable and comfortable watch overall. The new COROS APEX 4 just arrived for testing and I’m interested to compare these two watches against each other (stay tuned there).
Speaking of the loads of features, I’m sorely disappointed with the watch face options available from COROS. I’m a simple, meat-and-potatoes kind of guy and 99% of the watch faces are annoyingly flashy and unintuitive. I’ve tried several, but always stick with the standard because it’s clean and easily-read without my reading glasses. I do wish they would design more “boring” digital faces instead of all the funky ones.
Buy Now: COROS Amazon Store
The Bottom Line
So Pro
The COROS PACE Pro refines what a multisport GPS watch should be — powerful, intuitive and impressively lightweight. Its bright AMOLED screen, fast performance and deep training metrics make it ideal for trail runners and cyclists who want reliable data without extra fuss. Battery life is excellent, comfort is top-notch and activity tracking is spot-on. I’d say wrist gestures and low-battery warnings could be better. Overall, it’s a solid and versatile GPS multi-sport watch that proves COROS knows how to make a full-featured training watch at a reasonable price.
The Good:
- Bright screen that’s easy to read
- Captures all the running data you could want
- I love the heart rate broadcast feature
- Wears comfortably day and night
- Easily set up data fields for display
- Turn-by-turn navigation is awesome for unknown routes
- Durable face and case
- COROS data summaries are great
- Solid sleep tracking and recovery/fitness metrics
- Add/remove metrics during any activity
The Bad:
- Low battery warnings are easily missed
- Wrist flick is unreliable at turning on the face
- Requires double-button presses to start (because the GPS is 5 seconds behind, at most)
- All those hundreds of ugly watch faces — need more simple, clean options
- I wish I could auto-broadcast the HR per activity settings
- I still can’t update firmware from home — I have to do it from my office network
- Font size for messages is comically small for my 50 yr. old eyes
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Data Accuracy
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Screen Clarity
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Customization
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Software & platform
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Intuitive Menus
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Wearability
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Durability