Coros Pace 3

The Coros Pace 3 is an excellent sports watch, and a solid choice in terms of bang for your buck. It has great battery life, is very comfortable, and there are a lot of features including breadcrumb navigation, HRV tracking, compatibility with cycling sensors and built-in audio support. There's very little to fault in its performance for the price.

The Pace 3 is a multi-sport GPS watch that offers a range of high-end features at an affordable price. It's sleek and lightweight at just 39g on the road.cc Scales of Truth, making it comfortable for all-day wear. The only minor criticism I can think of is that you can’t use it to pay for things, like you can with an Apple watch.

Screen

The display remains the same size as its predecessor's (1.2in) but now includes a touchscreen alongside two buttons – a digital dial and a back button. The digital dial functions as a confirmation and scrolling tool, while the lower button is used for navigating back. A nice feature is that you have to hold the digital dial down for a couple of seconds to unlock the home screen so you don't accidentally press anything when your watch is under a jersey, for example. I found myself using a combination of the buttons and touchscreen and appreciated having both options.

The watch is really easy to set up and there's a vast selection of watch faces to choose from in the Coros app, as well as the option to create your own with photos. You'll then see whichever metrics you've selected on the screen. I chose for this to include step count, calories burned, active time and heart rate. Each can then be clicked to look at in more detail. The display is decent and shows all the information you need in a readable format.

App

The Coros app is available for iOS, Android and Google Play, and on my iPhone it's very simple and easy to use, doing what it needs to do. You can track your progress and look at metrics in more detail, create routes and also plan structured workouts.

All the watch face customisation is done through the app, and you get notified when the watch needs updating.

While these features are useful, I primarily used the app for setting up the watch, as the watch itself provided all the metrics I needed.

Connectivity and heart rate

The Pace 3 supports Bluetooth sensors only now, making a switch from both ANT+ and Bluetooth sensors on the Pace 2. You can connect to all the major Bluetooth sensors such as power meters, heart rate chest straps, speed sensors and cadence sensors. You can also save multiple sensors of the same type, but can only pair one sensor per type during a workout. So, one heart rate monitor and one power meter, for example.

Pairing the sensors was straightforward and I connected it easily to my Garmin HRM-Fit and power meter.

The Pace 3 uses an optical heart rate monitor, and heart rate is recorded every 10 minutes in daily use and every second in workouts.

It worked really well for the majority of sessions, though there were a couple of times where I didn't have it on tight enough and there were clear discrepancies between it and my chest strap (see below). I was impressed to see that an interval session on the turbo produced heart rate readings nearly identical for both the optical heart rate monitor and the Garmin HRM-Fit chest strap.

When discrepancies did occur, they were significantly off rather than just slightly. This happened on days when I had loosened the strap for sleeping and forgot to tighten it in the morning.

Another new feature on the Pace 3 compared with its predecessor is an optical pulse oximeter which can indicate SpO2 levels, which is the percentage of your blood that's saturated with oxygen.

The Pace 3 now includes Wi-Fi connectivity, allowing you to download firmware updates and import workouts directly to the watch. It also syncs directly to health and fitness apps such as Strava, TrainingPeaks, Apple Health and the like.

Battery life and charging

Great battery life is customary for Coros watches and it really is one of the things that impressed me the most about the Pace 3, especially coming from an Apple Watch Series 2 that needed daily charging. The battery life on the Pace 3 has also increased from its predecessor, now offering a claimed 38 hours of continuous GPS tracking, up from 27 hours, and 15 days of continuous daily use and sleep tracking, up from 11 days.

I've been wearing the Pace 3 daily and overnight, using it to track around four activities per week, and my testing certainly supports that.

I rarely have to check the battery level – which has nearly caught me out a couple of times! Thankfully, charging is quick via a proprietary connector, taking less than two hours for a full charge, and increasing by around 25 per cent in 20 minutes – great for a quick top-up when you're jumping in the shower.

Sleep

As with most smartwatches, the Pace 3 tracks your sleep, giving you details on duration, time spent in different phases, a comment about the quality, and your heart rate. This pretty much matches how I feel I've slept, but occasionally, if I woke up early and then fell back asleep, it didn't always register the extra sleep. For example, if I woke up at 7am and dozed off for another 15 minutes, it sometimes missed that, but for short periods, this isn't a problem.

An update that came to the Pace 3 while I was reviewing it was the ability to track naps, which it categorises as anything less than three hours, and you can also manually track a nap. Naps don't receive a sleep quality score but do contribute to that day's total sleep time.

Other data it tracks is your overnight heart rate variability (HRV), calculating your normal range and then assessing whether it's reduced, normal or elevated. I found this useful as a proxy for wellbeing and also how I was likely to feel during training that day. A lower HRV relative to your baseline may indicate that your body is less resilient that day.

> Buyer’s Guide: Best heart rate monitors – optimise your training with useful fitness data

To establish a baseline for your HRV, the watch needs to be worn to sleep for five nights. This is considerably less than Garmin's recommended three weeks of consistent use to build a personalised baseline.

To get the most out of smartwatch tracking you do need to wear it the vast majority of the time, especially in bed. Luckily, it's very light and not bulky, and I had no issues with comfort when wearing it for extended periods of time.

Navigation

There aren't any maps on the Pace 3 but you can build custom routes on the Coros app's Explore page and sync them to the watch. Routes from Strava can also be synced, though they need to be imported into the Coros app first.

> How to plan the perfect cycle route

Once your routes are ready, the watch supports both breadcrumb-style and turn-by-turn navigation.

Despite the line being on a blank background, you get turning notifications and you’ll know quickly if you take a wrong turn thanks to the deviation alerts. 

Training status and workouts

The watch includes metrics for training status and training load, designed to help you understand the impact of recent workouts based on a seven- to 42-day rolling average. You can also select and download workouts and training plans from the Coros website.

Music

You can store music on the Pace 3 as well as control GoPro and Insta360 action cameras. For music storage, it supports MP3-type files – not streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music – which need to be downloaded onto the watch via your laptop and charging cable. Once you have headphones connected via Bluetooth, you can play any stored music.

Water resistance

The Pace 3 is rated water-resistant up to 5 ATM, meaning it can withstand pressures equivalent to a depth of 50 metres. This makes it suitable for swimming and showering.

Notifications

The Pace 3 will keep you updated with notifications, if your phone is within range. You can customise which apps send notifications in the Coros app and even set up whether or not you want notifications to show up during workouts, as well as which notifications you want to show up – messages but not Instagram, for example.

You can view messages on the Pace 3 but replying to them isn't supported. This isn't too much of a problem, though, since your phone is likely nearby to have received the notification.

There's also a 'do not disturb' mode when needed, and a handy 'find my phone' feature, which plays a loud sound from your phone if you misplace it – a feature I frequently used with my Apple Watch.

Value

At £219, the Pace 3 offers great value given its extensive range of features. Garmin has a vast range of smartwatches with plenty of options near this price point, such as the Forerunner 165 for £249.99, but for a similar feature set you'd be looking at the Forerunner 265, which costs £429.99 (though currently discounted to £389.99). Not only is it over £200 more at RRP, it also has a shorter battery life of only up to 13 days in everyday use and up to 20 hours with GPS tracking (the Pace 3 offers up to 15 days of regular use and 38 hours of continuous GPS).

Wahoo's Elemnt Rival Smart Sports Watch with GPS is cheaper at £199.99 – and it's recently been on sale for £99.99 – but although it can track and record all activities, there's no navigation.

Overall

The Pace 3 is a great sports watch in terms of bang for your buck, with a heap of features found on much more expensive sports watches. It also has a great battery life with quick charging, and its low-profile design makes it comfortable for all-day wear.

Verdict

Great value, lots of features, good battery life and very comfortable to wear