Coros Pace 3 Review

Coros Pace 3 is one of the best GPS-running watches you can buy for a reasonable price in 2023/4 here is my review of it, warts and all. As per the title, I’ll give you all the warts based on over 5 years of regularly using Coros products.

At 31g, it feels lighter than a feather with its small form factor and it boasts the latest, accurate GPS and heart rate sensors and a vast array of sports features that appear to almost match those from Garmin. The battery life is incredible, offering 40 hours of recording time or 28 days of regular daily use – that’s more than enough for the longest of your Ultra run adventures. The screen is clear enough and the digital crown excels but it lacks both an onboard map and the ability to stream music.

Buy: USD229 , GBP219 , EUR249

Please skip to sections that interest you. There are some pretty detailed discussions on some niche subjects that I appreciate are not for everyone!

Q: Coros Pace 3 – Should I upgrade?

Answer: In short, Pace 3 is not worth the upgrade if you already own an older Pace 2. Other than newer sensors, there is little of true significance added into the mix with Pace 3. If you are an original Pace owner from 2018, go for it. You get a superior piece of running kit.

Whilst Coros as a brand compares favourably with Garmin, Suunto and Polar it offers no compelling reason to switch across from them unless you are unhappy.

However, if you find the limitations of your Apple Watch or other daily smart watch to be just too much for recording your sports then an upgrade to a true sports watch like a Coros Pace 3 is a good move. But it would also be a good move to switch to Garmin, Polar or Suunto by the same token.

Key Reasons To Buy a Coros Pace 3

Pros: Low cost for a great number of features, excellent battery life, generally accurate sensors

Cons: Lacks depth in features when it comes to routing, navigation and physiology. Unlike Garmin, Coros has no 3rd party app store to fill the gaps

Coros Pace 3 Review – What’s New?

Coros is good at updating older watches with the latest software features where the hardware can support it – meaning that the earlier Pace 2 already has most of the new features. Thus, what’s truly new today is just a few changes to the hardware plus some marketing that highlights the latest features in August’s firmware update. Here are the headlines

• Turn-by-turn instructions when following breadcrumb routes (maps are only on your smartphone)
• Some new sports profiles like snowboarding
• MP3 music playback from the watch to headphones with Bluetooth 5.0 Dual
• 2.4GHz&5GHz WiFi for faster firmware updates (not for music streaming)
  
• Scratch-resistant Corning glass touchscreen (not as good as Sapphire)
• Optical HR sensor incorporating a SpO2 blood oxygen sensor and wear detection
• Excellent, dual frequency Airoha/Mediatek GNSS Chipset, probably AG3335M (now you know)
• Improved battery life
• Improved readability in night mode
• Slightly thinner and very slightly lighter

Deep Dive – Custom Watch Faces

In my opinion, many of the watch faces we see from almost all sports watch vendors are extremely poor. Even the watches with awesome screens like Garmin’s Epix 2 just lack a good selection of watch faces that make use of the resolutions and colours on offer. Coros Pace 3 faces a bigger challenge than that as it only has a somewhat dull, low-resolution, colour LCD screen. Thus most of the Coros analog watch faces look bad. However, some of the digital ones range from passable to good.

With the limitation of the display in mind, Coros tantalisingly now offers the possibility of a custom watch face. (Heads up Polar and Suunto you need to do this as well). The customisation possibilities are restrictive but Coros had to start somewhere and this is it.

What you have is a series of templates with fixed metrics or hands. You can change the colour of this and you can also change the background and even add your image as a background. That’s it.

There is a limit of 5 watch faces on the watch so you have to create or edit your watch face on the smartphone and then choose which existing watch face to swap out.

Compare this to the Apple Watch where you can edit watch faces on the watch or on the smartphone and where you can choose which data complications go on specific parts of the watch face template. Those complications, in the case of Apple, can even come from any 3rd party. It’s a long way that Coros has to go to replicate that kind of functionality…it’s years away.

Deep Dive – Support For Advanced Stryd Running Metrics

Coros probably got itself into a pickle a few years ago with running power. The company seemingly cleverly made its first step into running power and developed some great functionality supporting Stryd’s running footpod.

MASSIVE Running Power Update from Coros – DEEP STRYD Integration – firmware update

However, I very strongly suspect that as Coros worked closely with Stryd before the launch, it neglected to tell Stryd that it was working on its power footpod in parallel. I also suspect that Stryd were none too happy when they found that out!! Handily for Stryd it had the foresight to patent its footpod invention. Perhaps that’s why Coros had to stop selling a running pod that calculated power and instead switched to the less accurate method of calculating it based on wrist movements.

Anyway, the latest Stryd pod has improved further, producing more frequent data than before to the point where it shows in high resolution how forces are applied throughout each footstrike. These latest-gen metrics were introduced by Stryd to its ecosystem at the back end of 2022, and are Impact Loading Rate and Lower Body Stress Score. These can ONLY be calculated from a Stryd pod and will likely never be able to be calculated from wrist motions, here are some more details. And now Coros supports collecting them via Pace 3!

new Stryd Metrics – They’re Good…but ! An Explainer

Analysis and Test Results

Coros Pace 3 is accurate, lightweight, and packed with most of the right sports features. Whether it’s a marathon or 5K, this watch is relatively intuitive to use and easy to interact with when using its Apple-like rotating crown. But you’re here because this is a well-priced running and sports watch, it’s one of the best value of any on offer at the EUR249 price point.

Performance Comparison

38 hours of battery life wipes the floor with the competition. It beats all other sports watches from the slightly cheaper Forerunner 55 (20 hours) to the somewhat comparable Forerunner 265 (24 hours). Conservatively, the battery life is 4x that of the Apple Watch 8.

Features

The sports feature set appears the most comprehensive at this price. You undoubtedly get the most headline features for your dollar with Pace 3.

There are now over 20 sports modes as Coros continues to include less important ones like skiing and snowboarding. To support your sports, Coros has the key sensors you need onboard like heart rate, barometric altimeter, and wellness sensors like SpO2 (Pulse Oxygen). Pace 3’s onboard connectivity is good enough and includes WiFi for firmware updates but lacks ANT+ sensor connectivity. The way forward for Coros is as a Bluetooth-only company but that’s OK and still gives you features like navigation and music control on your smartphone.

You can show simple breadcrumb routes with turn-by-turn instructions but for your more serious adventures you might need a proper map to put your route into the context to your current surroundings and Coros Pace 3 does NOT give you that.

Pace 3 offers a good range of ‘normal’ wellness features like sleep tracking. However, its physiology platform that analyses your training load,  training intensities and readiness is not quite there yet. Garmin’s physiology platform is more comprehensive and more robust, although I have doubts about the accuracy of many of the claimed insights all the brands highlight.

Keener, data-driven runners should sit up and listen now. Coros does not give you the impressive depth of metrics offered by Garmin and, perhaps more importantly, has no ‘app store’. What Garmin lacks in terms of metrics or functionality can very often be made up for by 3rd party apps and data fields. Coros is a long way from achieving the same and lags well behind Suunto and, to an extent, Apple in this regard. Thus even though comparison tables show that cheaper Garmin watches lack maps, maps can be added to Garmin by 3rd party CIQ apps like dwMap.

Notable Features:

• Support for complex structured workouts and calendarised training plans – even for trail running
• Breadcrumb route planning and navigation with turn-by-turn instructions
• Track mode – a Coros first, since copied by Garmin and others
• Sleep, sleep stage and readiness tracking
• Over 20 sports profiles
• Optical heart rate monitor and support for many 3rd party Bluetooth sports sensors
• Smartphone notifications
• Custom watch faces (a great start)
• Barometric altimeter (for running power on the wrist)
• Basic Fitness tracking (steps, stairs, calories)
• Suitable for swimming with WR50 (50m)
• Platform links to common apps like Strava, RwGPS and Komoot
• Coros’s training hub and Evolab offer training insights and one-to-one coaching support.

Coros Pace 3 AMOLED – Where is the pretty screen?

Coros was either technically unable to introduce AMOLED onto Pace 3 at this point or actively decided against it to keep the costs lower and maintain the ridiculously good battery lives. I suspect the latter. Plus the Twitter poll, below, shows quite a degree of ambiguity about AMOLED.

Do you want the Coros Pace 3 to have an AMOLED screen?

— the5krunner (@the5krunner) August 24, 2023

I think the decision goes even deeper. Watches that have the pretension that owners will wear them 24×7 will be more inclined to go AMOLED. Watches that are pure sports watches that you predominantly wear during sport (like Pace 3) just don’t benefit from AMOLED. So Coros made the right call here although it will cost them some sales.

Coros Pace 3 –  Ease of Use Review

For interacting with their features, sports watches offer a choice between buttons, a rotating crown and/or a touchscreen. Athletes typically prefer the certainty of a button press during sport but outside of sport a touchscreen or crown can work much better when there are complex menus to navigate through.

Here’s how the different sports watch brands stack up against each other

• Coros does not offer a multitude of menu options within each of its features. Thus there isn’t as much to navigate through compared with Garmin’s far more complete offering. The crown and new touchscreen are great at quickly navigating through menus. I miss buttons during the exercise and certainly miss buttons when stopping and saving an exercise with Coros.
• Apple has fewer sports features to navigate through than Coros and can thus sensibly rely solely on the touchscreen. For sports, it’s not quite as good as Coros and that’s one reason why Apple Watch Ultra introduced the extra button.
• Garmin seemingly has every feature and every possible option available with those features. Understanding the menus and navigating them is a complex art. More modern Garmins now have a good touchscreen that can be selectively disabled during workouts when you can rely totally on buttons. Garmin has the best in-workout experience but can be frustrating outside of a workout.
• Polar has 5 buttons and a touchscreen. Interaction works well with Polar watches although there are visual quirks. It’s intuitive because there is no menu maze to navigate.
• Suunto has 3 buttons and a touchscreen. Like Garmin and Polar, Suunto menus can be annoyingly laggy and in recent years Suunto has added MANY more features and its user interface doesn’t intuitively handle this expansion as well as it might.

The bottom line for me with Coros is that the crown/touchscreen combo works pretty well. My personal preference is for buttons i.e. NOT COROS, so I can’t get excited about Coros’s design choices but you might.

Coros Pace 3 – Digging into the Design

At 30g, the Coros Pace 3 is one of the lightest sports watches there is. That’s made possible mostly by the ‘plastic’ construction (fibre polymer). Don’t expect a high-end, scratch-resistant Sapphire touchscreen either. This one will still scratch even though it is Corning glass.

The rotating crown is plasticy but the one on the previous model lasted perfectly well so I’ve no reason to doubt the longevity of this one either nor the soundness of the button press.

The touchscreen seems to have been added as a tick-box feature. It doesn’t add much to the crown’s existing ability to scroll through menu options or screens and make a quick selection with a press of the crown. The crown looks a bit tacky but it does work well and its basic workings are well thought-through:

• Button Long Press – Gets access to generic watch features like battery status, settings and camera control
• Crown Rotate – Scrolls through an information-rich screen including, for example, training load, recovery status, sunset/sunrise times, 24×7 HR and more
• Crown initial press – brings you a list of sports profiles which the crown then scrolls through. Select the sports profiles and the basic settings can be changed before you start. Once you are in your workout the crown scrolls through your workout screens

My issue is with the icons and fonts that are used. They just don’t look good. Couple that with generally subpar watch faces and you get a plastic watch that just doesn’t look good outside of sport.

While the watch itself works well the interactions between it and the smartphone app are generally slow.

Coros has made a rational choice to offload some features like route and workout/plan management to the smartphone app. Some of those tasks are more easily accomplished on a phone’s bigger screen. Similarly, it is usually easier to change the layout of the sports profiles on the smartphone app too.

But.

But Coros is coming to the point now where several aspects of the smartphone app are becoming ever more clunky. Take, for example, sports profile screen editing where you might want to change one metric shown on a particular screen. The list of metrics has gradually got bigger and having one simple LONG list to scroll through is untenable.

Couple that with a smartphone app that could do with some TLC (tender love and care) and you are starting to grasp the size of the job that Coros has spent two or three years avoiding.

Its user interface is becoming like Garmin’s unwieldy one from a few years ago and needs a radical rethink quickly before it gets too late. But that’s an expensive thing to do which probably won’t at first generate any more sales so Coros will likely delay that a few more years only to then react when it’s too late.

Coros Pace 3 – Comparison Competitor Evaluation Review

This table was produced by Coros but it’s a good one and almost correct, so I’ll include it as-is.

this table is wrong: Apple Watch 8/Ultra has a dual-frequency GNSS chipset

Here is a brief analysis of how Pace 3 fares on each of those measures

• Battery life -EXCELLENT – This is a big selling point for Coros and Coros trumps Garmin, Apple and Co.
• Weight – Pace 3 is the lightest. However, these are all very light watches so the real edge Coros has here is tiny
• Satellite Systems – Every watch I’ve seen that has a dual-frequency ‘GPS’ chip performs well. Most new sports watches from 2022 onwards have this and the ones shown above that don’t have it are models that have been superseded
• Display Size/Type – Garmin Fr55 and FR255 lose out here to people who want the screen space to have bigger fonts for their metrics. Conversely, the smaller format is better for smaller wrists.
• Navigation Support – What Coros offers is not unusual and is on par with many others. As mentioned elsewhere, CIQ can add dwMaps to most Garmin watches and the Wahoo Rival is a triathlon watch and not a navigation/adventure watch.
• Touchscreen – This is simply a feature that some people prefer and is neither inherently good nor bad unless you are forced to use it during sport when it becomes bad!.
• Offline music support – Some people want music whilst working out. Luddites like me might like the ability to have MP3s copied to my watch but the rest of the world has moved on to use music streaming services and Coros can’t support those. It’s probably not worth Spotify’s while to interact with a small company like Coros.
• Sensors – the barometric altimeter that Coros and others have is important for accurate hill elevation detection but it’s also a vital component for watches that calculate running power from the wrist like Coros. Garmin will add a barometer to FR165. SpO2 is irrelevant, at best it’s only a wellness feature even if it’s accurate.
• Connectivity – Coros lacks ANT+ support which I don’t think matters for a running watch but it probably will matter if you plan to cycle more seriously
• Desktop Training Platform – This is simply a tick box for what can be a vastly complex, science-based training support ecosystem. Coros has plans, workouts and analysis but Garmin better links to the pro platforms and has a more thought-through app than Coros.

Competitor comparisons – Omissions

Another fault with Coros’s table, above, is that it can’t predict the future! Garmin FR165 is due and that is Garmin’s real competitor to Pace 3 for the next 2 years. You can be sure that Garmin will ramp up its features beyond what FR55 already offers. Then we have Apple which is now on the Watch 9 iteration (September 2023) although its features are similar to those quoted in the Coros chart above.

The Garmin 745 shown on the chart is not a competitor and is due for a replacement in any case.

Suunto 5 Peak is missing too. A cheaper and more elegant-looking watch that you can wear 24×7 that also has a reasonable battery life a good smartphone app and 3rd party app store.

Polar Ignite 3 is missing from the table too and it’s one of my favourites. It’s only slightly more expensive than Pace 3 but boasts a 30-hour GPS recording time despite its awesome-looking AMOLED screen. It has better-implemented watch features than Coros and a sports training platform with an impressively long pedigree that’s well-trusted by runners.

Finally, the Wahoo ELEMNT Rivall is also omitted and that is currently on sale at a fraction of the price of the Pace 3 – sometimes as low as $/£99. That’s a titanium-shell, top-end watch with an awesome app for half the price. I’d buy that one for a budget triathlon watch.

Wahoo rival – lowest ever prices for the elemnt triathlon watch

Coros Pace 3 – History

Coros originally made smart bike helmets. It seems they almost accidentally got into smartwatches with the original Pace which was essentially a rip-off of the Garmin Forerunner 235. Nevertheless, that product sold well and the company felt emboldened to then release a sports smartwatch called the Apex and then an adventure/climbing watch called Vertix, both majoring on cutting-edge battery lives inside shells made from high-quality materials and utilising an Apple Crown for menu navigation.

Perhaps unfairly they got the reputation as a Garmin rip-off company. However, that changed when Coros started to deliver products that had better battery lives than Garmin and introduced genuinely innovative features like Track Mode and Muscle Heat Map. Garmin followed suit.

As heart rate, GPS and other sensors improved, Coros was there or thereabouts with the leaders in introducing new sensor tech. However, the Coros app and watch features were initially somewhat of a smoke and mirrors trick. Coros ticked the boxes saying it had various features but the reality behind the scenes was lacking. Also absent were decent sports physiology metrics.

Coros addressed those shortcomings to some degree before Pace 3…

Coros – Current Status and Prospects

The 3 main Coros watches do all sell at least ‘a bit’ and you will occasionally see them on other athletes’ wrists, though I very rarely see people wearing the flagship Vertix watch – unlike Garmin’s Fenix/Epix watches or even Polar’s watches.

Pace 3 unit sales undoubtedly outstrip the combined sales of the Apex and Vertix models but alongside that, I would assume that Pace 3 has a significantly lower gross margin. I’m not entirely sure how Coros can carve out a profitable future mostly from this portfolio of products.

It gets worse. Coros is fundamentally a Chinese company with products made in China and a nominal marketing headquarters in the USA. Add to that the political uncertainty between that country and the USA and things could get difficult for the company…indeed, for any tech company based there.

But Coros does make good watches and has improved its software too.

The company’s first attempts at physiology metrics had questionable accuracy – for example, dcrainmker pointed out basic VO2max inconsistencies. Don’t get me wrong, Coros Evolab has progressed since then but has much further to go to catch up with Garmin.

Similarly, I’ve continually criticised the aesthetics of the watch and app over the years. There has been some improvement to both but neither matches the looks of, say, Suunto or Polar or some of the recent improvements Garmin has made. That said, the digital crown makes for a highly usable watch.

There are definitely more risks for consumers buying into the Coros ecosystem than the Garmin one.

Coros Pace 3 Accuracy

Coros Pace 3 has good to excellent GPS accuracy but somewhat mediocre heart rate accuracy, although you might strike lucky with the latter as results are use-case and user-dependent.

My detailed results are linked here but are only available on a supporter-only basis.

Coros Pace 3 – the best GPS? (more tests including HR and Elevation)

Here are some thoughts from other reviewers I trust.

Here are some results and a link from the Quantified Scientist’s look at HR and sleep accuracy. He probably produces the best scientific analysis of heart rate for sleep and sometimes also for weight lifting.

More: Quantified Scientist on YouTube

He rates the Pace 3 poorly for sleep stage analysis where Coros falls well short of significantly superior devices like Oura, Eight Sleep and Apple Watch.

Similarly, Pace 3 is not great for weight lifting and he concludes it’s better to wear a chest strap. Hopefully, we all knew that in any case. Again I must point out that HR is NEVER a valid mechanism for determing load from strength training. The best mass-market tool on the market right now for that would be WHOOP which includes augments HR with elements from Velocity-Based Training.

A good correlation was found with a Polar H10 chest strap for running.

GPS Accuracy

These are the running watches with the most accurate GPS/GNSS sensors that I’ve found, the order starts with the one with the most accurate GPS based on this difficult test, I obviously factor in real-world usage for an overall assessment as well but it almost always ties in with the results of my main test test:

1. Suunto Vertical (2023) 92%
2. Coros Pace 3 92%
3. Apple Watch Ultra 2 88%
4. Suunto Race 87%
5. Garmin Epix 2 87%
6. Suunto AMBIT3 RUN 87%
7. Apple Watch SE 87%
8. Coros Apex 2 Pro 85%
9. Garmin Forerunner 955 85%
10. Apple Watch 6 85%
11. Coros Vertix 2 85%
12. Garmin Forerunner 745 85%
13. Coros Apex 46mm 85%

Its score on this test was very flattering but even on a bad day it’s still a top-10 watch in terms of GPS accuracy (All constellations, dual frequency)

As always, if you are concerned about accuracy then buy a chest strap for HR and a running footpod like Stryd for pace accuracy. Coros also sell a pod. Any half-decent GPS watch will give you a track sufficient for a post-run track on Strava or in your log.

Coros Pace 3 – the best GPS? (more tests including HR and Elevation)

Q: Should You Buy Coros Pace 3?

A: Yes, it’s a great entry-level watch and a great first-time sports watch purchase. But it’s still probably twice the price that very many people want to pay for a casual, occasionally-used sports watch and it’s NOT up to the job as a cutting-edge 24×7 smartwatch.

If you want to record 3 gym classes a week, the occasional bike ride and a 5k parkrun at the weekend, consider instead an Apple Watch. You will get SO much more from it for your non-sports watch usage with options to choose an elegant watch face and strap for work or evening wear. You will only ever use your plastic Pace 3 during workouts. Now, if you are a decent-level athlete that’s a pretty good selling point. You want a lightweight watch and you might want some of the more advanced, sports-specific features like track mode, ultra running modes or use in multisports. Add to that another bonus – lighter watches can improve the accuracy of GPS/speed and heart rate.

If, like me, you are a half-decent wannabe triathlete with an unhealthy interest in sports tech and analysis then Coros struggles when put up against Garmin. The big omission is the lack of 3rd party apps and lack of ANT+ connectivity. Coros doesn’t quite cut the mustard. I don’t care that a Pace 3 is super light; a Garmin, Suunto or Polar is light enough. I don’t care that the watch’s lightness might make the heart rate and GPS a tad more accurate – I wear a chest strap and use a Stryd footpod to get perfectly accurate data pretty much all the time. Sure Coros supports those too but using them mostly negates having a super light watch that you only wear in sport.

If you are waiting for a Coros AMOLED watch it could be a long wait. As we have not seen an AMOLED version of Pace 3, the next time an AMOLED Coros watch is likely will be for Apex 3 in 2025-6 (ouch!).

Q: Is Coros Pace 3 worth it?

A: Yes, Coros Pace 3 is a reasonably good buy for anyone looking for a lot of features for a lower-priced running watch however if you already have a Coros watch it’s simply not worth the upgrade,

Q: Coros vs. Garmin, how does Coros Pace 3 fare as a running GPS watch?

A: Coros compares favourably to Garmin; the main difference is that Coros is a cheaper, newer brand whose ecosystem is not as well developed nor as capable as Garmin’s. Coros does give you more features for your dollar but often those features have neither been fully thought through nor implemented to the depth you might expect.

Take Out

Pace 3 represents a solid step forward for the new sensors added since Pace 2. Pace 3 is not a stumble forward nor is it a leap forward, it’s simply one evolutionary step on a long journey. However, its price IS an inflation-busting 25% jump forward from EUR199 to EUR249. That’s an unwarranted and overzealous leap in my opinion; probably one that will cost Coros dearly.

Almost all of the newly announced features for 2023 are also added to older watches like Pace 2…there is no real reason to upgrade from Pace 2 if you already have one.

Coros has made many of the easier headline improvements to its watches and ecosystem. From now on it’s going to be a hard slog for the company to meaningfully improve beyond introducing another generation of sensors that will perform very similarly to the current crop.

The Coros app and watch interface outside of workouts need significant aesthetic and usability improvements. Its sports physiology metrics need an audit and corrections.

I know I’ve dwelled on the negative points more than I normally do here. Despite my criticisms, Pace 3 remains a good workhorse, a good running tool. But it’s simply not that much better than Pace 2. It’s not worth the upgrade.

Furthermore, at the time of writing, Garmin has slashed the price of its Forerunner 255 watch to match Pace 3 and halved that price for its lesser-featured Forerunner 55. At those kinds of NON-LIST prices, Coros does NOT offer better features for your money than Garmin. Nor is its ecosystem as good as Garmin’s. There is a similar argument to be said for Apple & Polar watches during sale periods.

The bottom line though is that if you buy a runner a Pace 3 they will be happy with it. It does a great job.

Coros Pace 3 – Discounts, Price & Availability

Tip: Wait and grab a Pace 2 in the sales, it will have the same features as Pace 3! You’ll get a bargain at prices cheaper than its current GBP180/USD200 price tag. If you are OK at the price level then going £/$20 or so higher will get you a superior Garmin Forerunner 255 when it’s on sale.

If you prefer the latest model sports watches then Pace 3 comes in either black or white and either with a nylon strap or silicone strap. The prices are the same whichever you choose and are:

• USA – Pace 3 USD229 (Pace 2 is USD179)
• UK – Pace 3 GBP219 (Pace 2 is GBP179)
• Eur – Pace 3 EUR249 (Pace 2 is EUR199)