Coros Pace Pro hands-on review: the first AMOLED Coros watch

The Coros Pace Pro is an important addition to the brand’s range. It’s the first Coros watch with an AMOLED display, which are becoming the norm on the best sports watches, and it’s packed with features that will help it compete with mid-range rivals like the Garmin Forerunner 265 and Suunto Race S, like offline maps and long battery life in a lightweight design.

It’s a big step up in price on the Coros Pace 3, but you are getting a major design upgrade and some new features with the Pace Pro. I’ve been out for a first run with the watch ahead of its launch, here my initial thoughts on its design and sports tracking, and how it compares with options from other brands.

Coros Pace Pro cheat sheet

• Release date: The Coros Pace Pro launched on October 31, 2024
• Price: The Coros Pace Pro costs $349 in the U.S. and £349 in the U.K.
• What’s new? AMOLED screen, offline maps, faster processor, improved GPS chipset
• Key features: AMOLED screen, lightweight design, maps, long battery life
• Coros Pace Pro or Coros Pace 3? The Pace 3 is cheaper and lighter, but doesn’t have maps or the AMOLED display on the Pace Pro, which also has a faster processor.

Coros Pace Pro: price and availability

The Coros Pace Pro launched on October 31 and is available to buy now. It costs $349 in the U.S. and £349 in the U.K., and comes in three colors — blue, black and grey. It’s more expensive than the Coros Pace 3, which is $229 / £219, but cheaper than some of its key mid-range AMOLED watch rivals from other brands, like the Garmin Forerunner 265 and Polar Vantage M3, and the same price as the Suunto Race S.

Coros Pace Pro: specs

Coros Pace Pro: design

The new AMOLED screen on the Coros Pace Pro is a delight, and a big improvement on the memory-in-pixel displays we’ve seen from the brand so far. The 1,500-nit display is clear in all conditions and makes the watch more engaging to use outside of workouts, and easier to read during, especially the color maps.

I’ve always enjoyed using the Coros Pace watches partly because of their small and lightweight designs, and this is still a feature of the Pace Pro, though it is a little thicker than the Pace 3. It has a larger back button than the Pace 3, and the dial is made from stainless steel rather than plastic, which means the Pace Pro can take ECG measurements.

The materials used are not as rugged and premium as the metal cases and sapphire screens you get on more expensive Coros watches like the Vertix 2 and Apex 2, but the Pace Pro is still a good-looking watch and one that I’d be happy to wear all the time. The only thing I’m not a fan of is the silicone band it comes with — I’d trade that for a more comfortable and lightweight nylon one, from Coros or a third-party.

Coros has changed the charging port on the watch to be deeper, so you can’t use old Coros cables to charge it, and the brand has also taken the interesting step of including an adaptor in the box so you can charge the Pace Pro using a USB-C cable, rather than including a dedicated charging cable for the watch.

I think this is a good move as most people have a USB-C cable already, and if you don’t, you can contact Coros and they will send one out to you. It's a more environmentally-conscious approach, and while this is fairly common practice for most gadgets and phones, it is (still) a rarity for a smartwatch, which often have a unique propriety cable.

The Pace Pro has a new processor that Coros says is its fastest ever in a watch, and it is noticeably snappy when zooming in and out of maps. It also has a lot more storage than the Pace 3 with 32GB, as opposed to 4GB on the older watch.

Coros Pace Pro: sports tracking

The Coros Pace Pro offers the same wide range of sports modes as other Coros models, and the same training analysis which includes a breakdown of your training load, race predictions and a VO2 max estimate, and a recovery advisor.

Coros suggests the heart rate accuracy of the watch should be improved based on changes to the design, rather than new sensor. The watch is designed to fit more snugly than other models to improve optical heart rate readings, while a new satellite chipset and configuration is meant to improve GPS accuracy as well.

On my first run with the Pace Pro I did 10 miles in my local forest, comparing it to the GPS trails from the Polar Vantage M3 and Garmin Forerunner 965. I linked an armband heart rate monitor to the Garmin to compare this with the Pace Pro’s readings during the run. All the watches were in dual-band GPS mode.

The Coros Pace Pro was faultless on the accuracy front in this first run, matching the rises and falls in heart rate from the Polar Verity Sense armband beat for beat as I ran along a hilly route.

The GPS accuracy also looks excellent, having checked the GPS trace against the ones from the Garmin and Polar watches. All three look spot on to me and the distance measured and lap alerts were the same across the three.

I've also done an indoor cycle and a yoga session with the Pace Pro, and its heart rate tracking was accurate for both compared with the Verity Sense armband, so the early signs are promising for reliability on that front.

Outlook

The Coros Pace Pro looks set to be an excellent addition to Coros’s range and a much-needed one given that AMOLED screens are becoming standard on sports watches.

If the watch continues to be accurate during testing and the battery life lives up to expectations, the Pace Pro will be an attractive alternative to the Garmin Forerunner 265 at a lower price, also competing with the Polar Vantage M3 and Suunto Race S.

Having been a little threadbare at the start of 2024, the mid-range area of the sports watch market is suddenly awash with impressive AMOLED options, so the Pace Pro does have a lot to compete with, but so far it looks well able to hold its own.