I’ve been testing COROS products now long enough to understand where they fit in the fast-paced, highly competitive smart watch/wearable ecosystem. The watches are light, the battery outlasts almost anything at the price, and the training platform treats you like a serious athlete, while crossing over easily into everyday use. The one real limitation has been navigation, as the more entry-level PACE models never included true onboard maps. COROS is closing that gap with the PACE 4 Pro, a watch that just launched for $449 and, for the first time in the PACE family, includes full global mapping.
According to COROS, the PACE 4 Pro carries twice as much RAM as the standard PACE 4, which the company says makes for quicker, more responsive mapping, including points of interest, street and trail names, and turn-by-turn navigation. That feature is the biggest upgrade, because breadcrumb navigation on the PACE 4 gets me back to the trailhead, but does not tell me what road I am on or where the trail forks ahead.
The PACE 4 Pro has the biggest display the company has ever built, a 1.47-inch AMOLED panel at 466-by-466 resolution, and COROS rates it at up to 3,500 nits of brightness, which matters when squinting at splits or working out in the dark. The company wrapped the screen in sapphire glass and framed it with a narrow titanium bezel, and says the watch still weighs 43 grams with the nylon band and measures 11.8 millimeters thick. COROS quotes 60 hours of GPS tracking, dropping to 46 hours with the always-on display, and up to 21 days of daily-use battery, or seven days with the always-on display. It comes in black and white.
COROS positions the PACE 4 Pro as a companion to the PACE 4 rather than a replacement, and the company says the Pro adds nearly 50 percent more battery life and a screen that is 22.5 percent larger, with a weight penalty of 11 extra grams. The PACE 4 sells for $249 with breadcrumb navigation and no onboard maps, while the PACE 4 Pro lands at $449 with the full mapping. That makes it a different watch for a different runner, and it pushes the PACE line into the mapping-watch conversation that Garmin’s Forerunner lineup has dominated.
“It combines the largest and brightest display we’ve ever built with an incredibly narrow titanium bezel and sapphire glass screen,” said COROS CEO Lewis Wu. “Even with these improvements, the entire watch remains remarkably thin, weighing just 43 grams with a nylon band.”
The rest of the package is familiar COROS. The company says the PACE 4 Pro tracks heart rate, altitude, ambient temperature, pulse oxygen and ECG, and that its wearable metrics include resting heart rate trends, overnight HRV, sleep stages and daily stress. It also carries the voice-note feature COROS calls Voice Pins, which records a thought mid-run, tags it to a GPS location and syncs it to the workout file so you can review it in the app later. Buyers get the full COROS training ecosystem, including training plans, route building, pacing plans and recovery tracking; and workout files sync to Strava, Nike Run Club and TrainingPeaks.
The bigger story is the ecosystem the PACE 4 Pro plugs into, and COROS designed its first bike computer, the solar-powered DURA, to talk to its watches. The company says the DURA auto-pairs with a COROS watch and hands heart-rate duties to the wrist as the head unit powers on, so a ride, a run and a night of sleep all land in one app. COROS rates the DURA at up to 120 hours of battery with built-in offline maps and Google-powered rerouting, and it uses the standard quarter-turn mount, so you would not have to rebuild your cockpit to try it. There is no subscription anywhere in the system, and the subscription question is one of the clearest differences between COROS and Garmin right now. Garmin runs the deeper ecosystem, with onboard music, contactless payments, a large third-party app library and safety features like incident detection, and it recently added a paid Connect+ tier that drew criticism from many longtime users. COROS has gone the other way, keeping its app free, and Wu has said publicly that he intends to keep it that way for the foreseeable future. Reviewers tend to cast the choice less as which brand wins, and more as Garmin’s breadth against COROS’s focus on battery life, light hardware and a no-fee platform. COROS was the fastest-growing watch brand on Strava in 2025, and a watch like the PACE 4 Pro closes one of the last real gaps that sent runners to Garmin.
It may be easy to underestimate the brand, which was founded in 2014-15 and started out making smart bicycle helmets before it built a watch. The company is based in Irvine, California, with operations in Dongguan, China, under its parent company, Dongguan Yuanfeng Technology. Wu, who ran TP-Link’s North American business before he took over as CEO and co-founder in 2018, launched the first COROS GPS watch, the PACE, that same year. Since then COROS has grown into one of Garmin and SUUNTO’s most credible rivals, with an athlete roster that included Olympic marathon champion Eliud Kipchoge and the NN Running Team.
I’ve been testing the PACE 4 Pro on weekday runs, in the gym and across a couple of weekends at altitude. It is so feature-laden that it might not be the ideal daily driver, but I have come to enjoy the larger screen and updated interface for daily use, whether I am teaching a yoga class or tracking biometrics.
