Coros Pace 4 Review: Ideal for beginners

Design

• From 39g weight (including strap)
• Plastic casing
• Buttons, rotary dial and touchscreen

Sometimes the things that make a runner’s watch more expensive can, in some ways, make it worse. The Coros Pace 4 is a fairly humble and petite plastic-shelled design, but this helps it keep weight down to just 40g with the silicone strap I have, or 32g in the nylon band version. 

It’s nearly identical to the weight of the Garmin Forerunner 165. And low weight was one of the reasons I kept using that watch months after testing was over. A light watch is less prone to movement while you run, which can affect heart rate accuracy, and is far more pleasant to wear overnight. 

You can choose between the silicone or nylon straps when you buy, and the Pace 4 comes in subtle two-tone white and black finishes. 

Despite being a cost-conscious watch, the Coros Pace 4 has multiple methods of control. There’s a touchscreen, side buttons, and a rotating crown for scrolling through menus. The watch even has quite refined-feeling haptics, although the breadth of what the haptic motor can do isn’t close to as wide as an Apple Watch’s. 

Like just about every decent watch in this class, the Pace 4 has 5ATM water resistance and is considered ready for pool swimming. Just don’t take it for a diving session.  

Screen

• OLED screen
• 390 x 390 pixels
• Mineral glass protection 

The Coros Pace 4 has a 1.2-inch, 390 x 390-pixel OLED screen. It’s sharp, and dramatically more colourful and punchy than the MIP display of the Pace 3. 

In its default mode, the watch’s brightness is a little low considering the screen is rated at a more-than-respectable 1500 nits. You might want to consider bumping it up to one of the two higher settings to see what the Pace 4 can do, although none of them get close to the sheer brightness of a Garmin Forerunner 570 or Forerunner 970, mostly due to how brightness is handled versus ambient light level.

That’s no issue, though. They are far more expensive watches, and the closer Forerunner 165 is only rated for 800 nits of brightness.

You have the option to switch on the Pace 4’s “always on” mode too. As usual, this keeps the screen lit when the watch is worn but not in use, displaying a dimmed version of the clock display. But it does come with a cost to battery life. 

Features and battery life

• Up to 19 days of battery life
• Dual-band GPS
• Music support for Bluetooth devices

Coros rates the Pace 4 for up to 19 days of use between charges, to six days in the always-on screen mode. 

I’ve found it tends to last around 12 days with my kind of usage. But you can expect greater variance in an OLED watch like the Pace 4 than an MIP one like the Pace 3. And that’s particularly true if you set the screen to stay on during tracked exercise and do some longer distance running, cycling or walking. 

This is excellent stamina for a watch this small with an OLED screen. Long battery life is a common trait among Coros watches. 

The Pace 4 is one of the company’s cheaper watches, though, which rules out a few higher-end features. You can’t download map data to the watch; only breadcrumb-trail-style GPX files. 

And while there is a microphone, there is no speaker. In most watches, the microphone and speaker come as a pair, because one of their main duties is enabling a connection to a smart assistant. But Coros has taken a different approach with the Pace 4. 

You use the microphone to log voice note style clips to accompany your workouts, or as “voice pins” more likely to be useful for hiking and walking. I doubt many will use this too often, though, as it’s actually not that convenient to do with the current software version. 

Returning to the more familiar stuff, the Coros Pace 4 has a typically highly competitive set of features in this class. It has dual-band GPS, for better location tracking in more challenging spaces. I had zero issues with GPS signal during testing, although I was not testing in a steep valley or in the centre of Manhattan. 

Coros also provides some stats that go beyond the beginner stuff. At the top of the list is a set of vitals that serious athletes can use to manage their workload. These are training load, recovery (expressed as a percentage) and Training Status. As usual, these are influenced by factors such as your sleep, workouts, stress, and your heart rate relative to performance during workouts. 

Add to those your Running Fitness stat and cycling FTP, and runners/cyclists can get a reasonably complete view of how their training is working over time. Viewing Running Fitness data doesn’t require any extra effort and gives you an estimate of your 5K/10K/HM/marathon times. It’s a little like VO2 Max, but it isn’t a replacement for it, as you can find that score too if you dig into the app.  

However, as usual, cycling FTP requires a power meter, so Coros isn’t just left pulling stats out of the air. 

The Coros Pace 4 doesn’t lack any core sensors either. Its heart rate array has the LEDs required for blood oxygenation readings, and crucially, there is a barometric altimeter too. Coros doesn’t use this to estimate the number of flights of stairs you climb each day — which Garmin offers — but you can see your elevation and air pressure. 

There’s not much friendly fluff to the Coros Pace 4 considering it’s a somewhat entry-level watch, but then again if you seek out this brand, proper activity tracking is likely your goal. Another kind of fluff might be worth thinking about a little more, though. 

The Pace 4’s interface is practical and not too complicated, but it isn’t super slick compared with that of plenty of other less fitness-driven OLED watches. And that of the Garmin Forerunner series. A bump in sharpness and vibrancy, thanks to the screen, isn’t really matched with much improved interface sophistication and style. 

You can also use the Coros Pace 4 for phone-free entertainment, as it has some storage for music. 4GB is the quoted figure, but only around 1.7GB is actually available. These need to be your own digital audio files, as the Pace 4 does not sync with music services like Spotify. 

Once again, a smartwatch-style display doesn’t come with a modern smartwatch sensibility elsewhere. And as there’s no speaker, you need to connect to Bluetooth headphones or a speaker.

The Pace 4 can also send its live heart rate data to other devices over Bluetooth. It’s not a proprietary system, operating much like a Bluetooth-based HR chest strap on the back-end. 

Performance

• Decent but imperfect HR results
• Very good tested GPS accuracy 

The Coros Pace 4’s performance can be divided into two core characteristics. Location tracking is great; it can reliably pin your position tightly enough to clearly show when you cross the road, without ending up with a map showing you careening through buildings. 

Triangulation takes a few seconds, but nothing long enough to slow down your workouts as long as the Pace 4 has up-to-date GPS info synced through the Coros app. 

There are some slight holes to poke in the Pace 4’s heart rate readings, but likely not deal-breaking ones for most. 

For running, it only messed up on the initial test run, showing a too-high heart rate throughout. Following that, though, the Pace 4 was mostly great for running. No major mess-ups during the start of workouts, or meandering readings during long runs. It would sometimes record noticeably higher max figures than my test Garmin watch, generally relating to short clips amid otherwise consistent figures.

It was in other pursuits that the Coros Pace 4 didn’t quite do as well as that Garmin Forerunner 970 I used for comparison purposes. Gym visits end up producing too vague-looking a heart rate graph, the watch missing a lot of the short peaks involved with ordinary weight sessions. 

The Pace 4 didn’t excel during a spin class either, showing a heart rate that was too low throughout. It’s good at the core stuff, but may struggle on occasion to provide super-accurate results in more challenging scenarios.

I also find Coros’s sleep tracking relatively forgiving. It’s not that its estimates of your time sleeping are way off, more that its verdict on less-than-ideal nights is pretty lax. That said, if you have owned a Garmin and are tired of it always saying you’re on the verge of collapse thanks to poor sleep, maybe that’s not a bad thing.

Should you buy it?