The COROS Pace 4 Pro at first glance might just look like a premium materials Pace 4, and in many ways, there’s a fair bit of truth to that. And there’s nothing wrong with that, as I’ll dive into. It’s unquestionably a more premium watch than either the Pace 4 or Pace Pro, and it’s got a new heart rate sensor too (don’t worry, plenty of accuracy testing below).
But from a company standpoint, it represents a clear attempt at trying to break into the premium market. Less ‘trying to make’, and more ‘trying to get people to buy it’. While COROS continually smashes it out of the park when it comes to budget watches (e.g., the Pace 3 and most recently the Pace 4), it has repeatedly struggled to attract buyers to more premium-priced devices that compete head-to-head on price with Garmin. After all, it’s been 5 years since the last major launch of their top-end flagship COROS Vertix 2 (and no, I don’t count the slight materials refresh in the Vertix 2S as a major new watch, and even that was 2.5 years ago).
With the COROS Pace 4 Pro at $449, COROS is trying to thread the line just enough under Garmin’s premium pricing of the Forerunner 570 (at $549) to entice buyers to forget the FR570’s extra software features, and save the cash for ice cream. The question is, does COROS pull it off?
With that, let’s dive into it!
What’s New:
In some ways, it’s hard to have a ‘What’s New’ section when COROS doesn’t have a prior-generation Pace 3 Pro to compare it to. Instead, this watch is basically a re-imagined COROS Pace Pro, but with the ‘4’ stuck in there to keep marketing life simple. Though, it gains some features the Pace 4 added that the Pace Pro lacked.
There, here’s how it differs from the existing Pace Pro:
– Larger 1.47” AMOLED display from 1.3” AMOLED (biggest COROS screen to date)
– Increased pixels (466x466px vs previous 416x416px)
– Increased brightness to 3,500 nits (Pace 4 was 1,500 nits)
– Ability to add up to 11 data fields per page (from 8 fields on Pace Pro)
– Added new multi-data page field that can cram in 13 data fields
– New 4th Gen optical HR sensor (for COROS watch with it)
– Added sapphire glass display
– Added action button (Pace Pro doesn’t have that, though Pace 4 does)
– Added microphone (Pace Pro doesn’t have that, though Pace 4 does)
– Added voice control from watch (Pace Pro doesn’t have that, though Pace 4 does)
– Added full speaker (neither Pace Pro nor Pace 4 had that)
– Added ability to take calls from watch (neither Pace Pro nor Pace 4 had that)
– Added GPS ‘Auto’ mode (dynamically selects required satellite level)
– Increased maximum GPS battery from 38 hours to 60 hours
– Improved bezel material from plastic to titanium
– Increased weight from 32.5g to 38g
– Doubled the onboard RAM
– Same 22mm band size (same as Pace 3/4, Pace Pro, APEX 2 Pro, APEX 4 42mm)
– Priced at $449USD, 449EUR, $799AUD, 389GBP, 619CAD
From a software standpoint, there are actually no new software features here. At least unique/specific to the Pace 4 Pro. Instead, all the COROS watches are getting their usual roughly quarterly update of software features, and the Pace 4 Pro is part of that (as is the Pace Pro). For example, for September this included an update to the Adventure Journal (mostly on-app), the option to directly transfer firmware via computer, and cycling climb alerts on the watch (previously this was on Dura). Also recently there was a revamped sleep score and sleep metrics on the COROS app.
In terms of color options, there’s black and white, each with either the silicone or nylon straps:
In terms of all the other usual bits for recent COROS watches, it’s got:
– Global offline mapping pre-installed (and free downloadable updates)
– Turn-by-turn navigation with pre-planned route
– Barometric altimeter
– Dual-frequency/multiband GNSS/GPS
– 32GB of Storage
– 447 mAh battery capacity
– 5ATM (50m) water resistance
– Access to the COROS MCP for connecting to Claude & ChatGPT
Next, looking at the size, here’s how things compare:
Also, importantly, the display itself is identical in size to that of an Oreo. Concerned about accuracy, I measured it three times with three different Oreos. I can confirm all three Oreos tasted great. I mean…they were all properly calibrated to match the display.
Finally, from a battery chart standpoint, here’s where things stand:
Just to quickly cover this chart with my real-world testing. When it comes to daily battery life, I’m seeing roughly 4-6 days in the real world (which is inclusive of 1-2 hours of GPS workouts per day).
For the workout claims, I’m simply not getting anywhere near those results. They claim 30 hours in always-on display mode with Max GPS, yet I’m consistently under 20 hours, sometimes low 20 hours. For running, they’re saying it may be a bug with the GPS subsystem. For cycling, it’s also been consistently estimated at 20 hours. In cycling, they say that’s because of a bug in how the device goes into Bluetooth accessory scanning mode each time I stop (including even at stop lights/stop signs), searching again for any sensors it can’t find (such as those for other bikes). As a result, in cycling mode it’s barely achieving an estimated 20 hours of battery life. COROS says they plan an update in November to address this.
With that, let’s dive into the daily basics!
The Basics:
In this section, I’ll cover all the daily basics of using the watch. Things like the hardware, user interface, activity/sleep tracking, and more. Then after that we’ll dive into all the sports bits, following which I’ll cover the accuracy of the new heart rate sensor, as well as GPS accuracy.
Starting off with the hardware aspects, the unit has three buttons, with one of them being the Digital Crown. On the left side you’ve got a button that opens up a quick-access control panel (for enabling/disabling things like sleep mode, or satellite modes, speaker volume, etc.). This was previously the Action Button on other recent watches, but now it is more…ummm…actionable. During activities it switched to the map page.
Meanwhile, on the right side, there’s the Digital Crown for scrolling through menus (and pressing enter to start a workout), as well as the lower right button, which acts as a ‘back/escape’ option. You can long-hold the lower right button to get to the controls menu.
As for the Digital Crown, as always I like them for scrolling in maps, but otherwise I find them finicky on a sports watch. This includes on Apple Watches just as much as COROS watches. That said, with the touch screen on the COROS watch, I’ll generally use that for getting around menus instead, so it’s mostly a wash here.
Next, the Pace 4 Pro has a much brighter 3,500 nit display – by far the brightest display from COROS. Do keep in mind though, that every company advertises *peak* brightness, not actual constant brightness levels, which are variable based on the ambient light sensor. No company can maintain an AMOLED display at 3,500 nits constantly without slaughtering the battery and display life.
That said, it’s also unnecessary to do so. I live on an island in the Mediterranean, where it’s bright and sunny, and I have no issues seeing the Pace 4 Pro in any lighting conditions (including bright sunny days), and most of the time I can tell it’s clearly not at 3,500 nits (because even 1,500 nit watches are more than enough for sunny days).
Here’s the Pace 4, Pace Pro, and Pace 4 Pro side-by-side in direct sunlight:
In the above case, all units were set to their default brightness settings of ‘Standard’ (there are three levels: Standard/High/Max). Point being, even on the lowest level, I had no issues at all.
Now, one nifty thing here is the new battery usage feature COROS recently added to their app. This lets you see what drives battery level for each function. The problem is, as nifty as this is, it’s also hilariously wrong when it comes to sport usage. I’d argue it’s heavily misleading, though I think that misleading aspect is more engineering geekery than purposeful deceit. The reason is that the % listed next to the activity level is incorrect. Instead, it’s *only* looking at the GPS function specifically, not the processing pieces, which get bundled under ‘General Use’ and ‘Daily Features’, making it seem far higher in GPS time than reality.
So, let’s look at today’s run I just did (90 mins). In this case, looking at the battery chart, it shows a mere 2.6% above.
But in reality, you can see the before/after photos I took, where the battery went from 69% to 61%:
Since the beginning of watch time (including COROS’s own GPS battery claim chart shown above), you’d list this as 8% battery loss. Not 2.6% battery loss. I brought this up to COROS (for a different workout/ride), and it sounds like some changes might be on the way, with them saying:
“Lastly, sorting out the battery health / usage topic with our PM now and we are sorting out a way to display battery drain for an activity with sub-items all from within the activity usage, so in your example you would see 15% as the total activity amount rather than 8% for the activity, and the other 7% placed under other categories.”
Hopefully that’ll happen, as the feature is actually really really cool, and better than anything else out there for sports watches (Apple has some elements of this on the app, and Garmin has most aspects of this on the watch, but COROS implements it better UI-wise long-term in the app).
Nonetheless, moving along, here’s the stock watch face. As with other COROS watches, you can customize plenty of it within the watch itself, or from the COROS app:
Sliding down from there are the widgets. Each widget glance of sorts can be opened up to see more details about it. For example, here’s the daily activity widget showing today’s activity details, and then if I crack that open, I can get those metrics trended over 7 days:
Scrolling down from there, there’s a handful of others as well. I can customize these, including whether they appear, as well as the order:
Of course, one of them is sleep metrics. Here I can see my sleep summary details, as well as my deeper stats like sleep phase/stage time.
All of this is also displayed on the COROS App, including newly revamped sleep pages with sleep score details, and tons more sleep data. Or at least, the presentation of the data is improved.
Additionally, in the event you take a nap, COROS will show nap details. In fact, I really like the way they show your different sleep bits on a single page, and even offer the ability to merge things together. Like, for example, two days ago when I went to bed too late, then we had some bonkers-crazy thunderstorms in the middle of the night that kept all the kids up for a bit. Point being, by the time I got back from school drop-off rounds, I just went back to sleep for 90 minutes.
As for the accuracy of these metrics, I focus specifically on the times I went to sleep and woke up. And these have been mostly spot-on, though, last night wasn’t great. I don’t compare sleep phase/stages, because that’s mostly fake-science for clicks. The accuracy of those metrics from so-called gold-standard methodologies is only about 80% accurate. So trying to compare one device to something that’s at best 80% accurate isn’t super helpful to anyone. Thus, I won’t waste your time with that.
Instead, if we look at last night, for example, here’s how things handled (I was reading on my phone for a while):
Feel Asleep (Actual): ~12:50-12:55AM
COROS Pace 4 Pro: 12:01AM
Apple Watch Ultra 4: 12:50AM
Garmin Cirqa (Bicep): 11:56PM
Whoop 5.0/MG: 12:52AM
Amazfit Helio (Bicep): 12:55AM
Fitbit Air (Bicep): 1:03AMWoke Up (Actual): Alarm at 7:50AM, snoozed to 7:58AM
COROS Pace 4 Pro: 7:58AM
Apple Watch Ultra 4: 7:58AM
Garmin Cirqa (Bicep): 8:00AM
Whoop 5.0/MG: 7:56AM
Amazfit Helio (Bicep): 7:58AM
Fitbit Air (Bicep): 7:49AM
Next, one of the metrics it’ll capture while you’re sleeping is your overnight HRV. It’ll trend this over time after you’ve established your baseline metrics, showing things like ‘Normal’ or outside of ranges:
Here’s how that compared last night:
COROS Pace 4 Pro: 64ms
Apple Watch Ultra 4: 66ms
Garmin Cirqa (Bicep): 63ms
Whoop 5.0/MG: 63ms
Amazfit Helio (Bicep): 68ms
Fitbit Air (Bicep): 55ms
As you can see, virtually all of them are the same. Save the Fitbit Air, which I find consistently low for whatever reason.
Now, all of these metrics (HRV, sleep, activity, etc.) are pulled into the COROS app on your smartphone, where you can view them and dig into more details for any of them. You can also adjust these tiles as you see fit:
Next, switching topics, at this juncture COROS has yet to implement a real LED flashlight into their watches. Still, they do offer a simplistic screen-based flashlight. And given the brighter 3,500-nit display, it works just fine.
That said, I’m really hoping COROS joins the Flashlight Club (which currently contains Garmin, Suunto, and Amazfit). It’s just more practical to have the flashlight pointed at the thing you’re trying to illuminate, rather than illuminating my own face.
Now when it comes to music, note that the COROS Pace 4 Pro does have music storage on it, but realistically you probably won’t use it. It supports downloading MP3 files, and then pairing up your headphones via Bluetooth. But of course, in 2026 almost nobody is doing that. They’re instead using platforms like Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, etc., which COROS doesn’t support (certainly COROS would love to support those platforms, but those major platforms have largely gatekept their services).
That said, you can control music/media on your phone, such as podcasts or any other platform:
Oh, and lastly, there’s the voice control bits. There’s actually a few different features that leverage the microphone, both in workout mode (like saving voice notes), as well as afterwards for saving workout notes. But in regular mode, you can also use it to simply use your watch to open things. Just long-press the lower left button. For example, you can ask it to start a run:
Now, as I’ve said on countless other watches, I’m not really a ‘talk to my wrist’ guy. And especially not a ‘it takes longer to talk to my wrist and wait than just press the darn button twice’ kinda guy. I’m sure down the road years from now this sort of thing will be faster and more useful, but these days it’s mostly a gimmick to me. Nonetheless, to each their own!
With that, let’s head out for a workout.
Sports Usage:
Next up, if you’re buying a COROS watch, you’re almost certainly doing so for some sort of sports usage. So in this section I’m gonna go through all those pieces, including during workouts, post-workout training load and recovery pieces, as well as a bit of offline mapping and navigation components. To be clear, absolutely nothing here has changed since any other recent COROS watch (which are all running essentially the same software). Instead, the changes around sport usage mainly come from heart rate accuracy, which I cover in the next section.
In any case, the first step is choosing a sport mode. The COROS Pace 4 Pro has virtually all the major sport modes you’d expect. It’s not quite the Girls Gone Wild listing of some 200 sports modes of Amazfit, but it gets the job done. The main ones you’d be missing compared to some of COROS’s higher-end watches are around climbing (e.g., rock climbing). But if heights aren’t your jam, then you won’t miss anything here.
In any case, to select a sport mode, you’ll tap the upper right button and scroll through the sport modes to find your pain:
Once you’ve done that, it’ll go off and find GPS (if outdoors), as well as any sensor accessories (such as cycling power meters or an external heart rate sensor). It’s here that you can select things like structured workouts, basic interval workouts, and apply a route for navigation. Or just tweak other sport settings.
In our case for today’s run, I’m going to load up a route/course. I created this route in Strava, which then pushed to my COROS account. Though (still) annoyingly, COROS doesn’t automatically transfer that to my watch. I’ll need to go into the COROS app and then select to push it to the watch. I know I’ve harped on this for years, but when it comes to tiny features that are actually helpful to athletes, just syncing the darn route is so much more useful than voice prompts.
Once I send it to the watch, it appears here to select, along with some quick stats about the run:
You can also, of course, create routes on other platforms, import GPX files, and create routes within the COROS app as well (including creating waypoints).
Once all that is sorted, out we go for our run. While running, you’ll see the data pages as you’ve configured them. All of this is pretty straightforward:
When it comes to that route, you’ll see your route overlaid atop the map, and then get turn notifications ahead of each turn (about 50m away while running/hiking, a bit further while cycling). It’ll indicate which way to turn:
If you go off-route, then the watch will let you know within about 50m as well. Note that the COROS watches don’t support offline re-routing. It’ll simply let you know which compass direction the actual route is, and it’s up to you to figure that out.
You can also see your elevation profile of the planned route, and other handy stats:
Plus, automatic climb details will engage as you hit a climb:
In the event you want to create a voice note, pinned to the location, for later inclusion in your workout journal, you can do that via the controls menu. These will then show up as notes (with your voice note using the microphone) on the journal and workout track. Again, it’s not really my jam, but I know people who do find the voice notes useful for scouting things. Note the play button below, and then the automatic transcription (I include the actual audio in my review).
Once your workout is complete, you’ll see all the summary stats on the watch, such as this from today’s trail run:
And you can also add yet another voice note, this time for RPE. I’ve skipped that, and just went with smiley-face style. That’s more my jam.
Then, once this all syncs to the COROS app, you can see your full workout details here; note in particular, it’ll show your voice notes on the map itself, and you can also add in photos from the workouts, which will show up accordingly in the right spots using GPS information.
When it comes to training load metrics, COROS has a basic Race Predictor feature, a Running Score feature, and Training Load metrics. Here’s the Race Predictor feature. Note that this really only takes into account flat-ground runs, and not hilly trail runs like mine. In my case, the vast majority of my runs are trail runs (and specifically, very hilly ones), so my numbers rarely get updated here.
There’s also your overall training Intensity and Recovery metrics. I find the recovery metrics reasonably close to how I’m feeling.
Next, there’s training load. And like clockwork, I’m going to complain again that this resets every single Monday. In real life, training load doesn’t reset every Monday. If you did the Berlin Marathon on Sunday, you still very much have that training load in your legs Monday morning (as any staircase will remind you). Yet for COROS, it all disappears. Here’s my Sunday night:
And then the next day it’s zero. Sigh.
I’m hoping if I keep banging this drum, COROS will finally change it. They did on the smartphone app, but not yet on the watches. Eventually?
Heart Rate & GPS Accuracy:
First, let’s look at a lazy interval workout yesterday; you can see that overall it’s mostly good. There’s one minor error early on for a few seconds, then it sorts itself out. Along with some slight delays coming down from intervals towards the end (as I’d start the walk), though neither is a massive deal. Also very, very slight delays on the start of some intervals, but nothing you’d likely notice in real life.
Next, we’ve got a harder interval workout at the track. Now, in this case I had a Polar H10 chest strap with me, though apparently it was on its last battery legs, and created a proper mess of things, as you can see below. Still, as for the COROS itself, it happily agreed with all the other devices on this journey, which is good. And if I sift through the mess below, I don’t see any cases where the COROS Pace 4 Pro is out of line here.
Next, some indoor trainer high-intensity intervals. From a cycling standpoint, these 30-second intervals went from 150w to 590w, and were probably the most visible case of delays with the optical HR sensor. You can see it took quite a while to catch up:
That said, for these sorts of high-intensity intervals, the delay of the HR being a few seconds late isn’t usually something most coaches (or analytics aspects) would look at. That’s because HR itself (your actual heart) is a lagging indicator for effort here. Instead, using pace or power is what actually matters here. And you can see in the second half when I lowered the intensity a bit, it was much faster to catch up.
Meanwhile, on this other trainer ride, which was following a virtual route where things were a bit more civil, the two lines are reasonably close. There are some minor quirks coming down from high-intensity moments, where you see a bit of bobble in the HR. Nothing massive, but something that could use a bit of work. Also note the colors are flipped here, just…sigh…because.
The same goes here with another trainer ride. On the whole it’s pretty darn good (though remember, trainer rides are like the easiest thing ever for optical HR sensors). Still, there are some minor mistakes here that could use some work. This kinda vaguely reminds me of Polar’s HR mini-spike/bobbling-drop issues on most of their recent wristwatches.
And then switching to the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of difficulty for optical HR sensors to track, is an outdoor ride. Here we can see that, on the whole, it’s got the gist of things. But we can also see numerous errors/offsets, especially at higher intensities when things are normally stable. This is actually fairly unusual. Usually for outdoor cycling, once you reach a higher intensity, heart rate readings tend to become easier for devices to track. It’s the transition phase (easy to hard, hard to easy) that most wearables in rougher conditions mess up.
In any case, looking at the new optical HR sensor, I’d argue it is improved over the previous generation, but equally, other companies are also improving. And I’d say those other companies’ pace of improvement is faster than COROS here. Which isn’t to say the above is bad. It’s certainly not. But rather, the bar has been raised, and while COROS has made improvements, their overall place in the standings stays roughly at the upper end of the mid-tier. But it’s far from industry-leading.
Meanwhile, for GPS I’m simply not seeing anything that’s concerning at this point across running (trail running and road running), as well as cycling. For example, a trail run today (in ‘High’, but not ‘Max’), and things are virtually identical to the Fenix 9 Pro:
I’ve got some other watches in this test, but you’ll have to wait till next week for those. Either way, they all match here.
Here’s another trail run, this time versus the Amazfit Dual Solar watch (and Garmin Fenix 9 Pro), at the ‘Auto’ level, all looks well:
Though, you can see in the trails that the COROS Pace 4 Pro easily outperforms the Amazfit unit, which was frequently off in the bushes. I only spend time in the bushes when I need to collect a crashed drone, and this wasn’t one of those times.
Here’s an interval run we did on the streets. Over and over again loops. Loops like this are always fun for repetition purposes on GPS tracks. Again, at a high level it all looks good:
That said, looking closely here, I do see a slight offset by the COROS on this stretch. Again, merely the wrong side of the street, so not a massive deal. Though, consistently the wrong side every loop. The others were correct (we ran down the left side of this deserted street).
Setting aside this street/turn, on the whole I think the COROS Pace 4 Pro has perfectly functional GPS accuracy. As I noted earlier, I remain a bit concerned about the battery burn during GPS workouts, due to bugs COROS says are lingering, causing that battery to be substantially higher than it should be. COROS says fixes are coming in the November timeframe, but as always with GPS vs. battery fixes, there’s usually a tradeoff. Especially in cases like the Auto one where COROS says it’s switching too frequently.
In any case, it’s something I’ll keep an eye out for later this fall.
(Note: All of the charts in these accuracy portions were created using the DCR Analyzer tool. It allows you to compare power meters/trainers, heart rate, cadence, speed/pace, running power, GPS tracks, and plenty more. You can use it as well for your own gadget comparisons; more details here.)
Wrap-Up:
Overall, the COROS Pace 4 Pro definitely *feels* more premium. It was easily mistaken by friends as a Garmin Forerunner 570 or Forerunner 970 on my wrist numerous times. It looks a lot like it. The display is brilliant, in terms of size and clarity, as well as brightness. Likewise, the titanium bezel looks nice. All of that is good. Whether or not consumers find the $150 upsell over the existing COROS Pace Pro to be worthwhile is probably the bigger question.
COROS has argued in media presentations that it competes with the Forerunner 970. As I noted in the video, that’s simply a hard no. Not even close. On the hardware front, it lacks many of the hardware features the Forerunner 970 has (e.g., the flashlight, medically certified ECG, a much better optical HR sensor, better GPS accuracy, and more). And then on the software side, it’s not even close, no matter which software category you choose. Garmin dominates there (very deeply).
However, compared to the Forerunner 570? That’s fresh meat for the taking. Priced $100 more at $549, the Forerunner 570 lacks offline maps, lacks a flashlight, and lacks ECG. Yes, the Forerunner 570 is an excellent sports/running watch if you exclude those features, and is deeper in most (all?) of the non-mapping sports categories than COROS is. But it’s a price tradeoff that it seems many people are willing to take. COROS is better served to focus on that battle.
But whether those same consumers are willing to pay substantially more than the Pace 4 or Pace 4 Pro for nearly the same software? Now that’s a bigger COROS-focused question that only time will tell. History has spoken loud and clear (repeatedly) that COROS is most deadly when they focus on budget. Though, this time it does somehow feel slightly different.
Either way, I think it’s a great-looking watch that’s coming from a company that continues to push new features to both the app and hardware roughly every quarter, and also continues to add polish to the app & watch firmware.
With that – thanks for reading!
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