Coros Apex

amazon Coros Apex reviews

The Coros Apex is a multisport GPS watch with great battery life and a data-rich companion app that provides a wealth of insights into your cycling, running, swimming, and more.

Coros is known in the cycling community for its smart helmets, making durable GPS sports watches and fitness trackers. Starting at $299.99, Apex is designed for outdoor sports like cycling, hiking, running, skiing, snowboarding, swimming, and triathlon. It tracks distance, altitude, heart rate, heart rate zone, speed, stride, time, workout effects, and more. Its app displays beautiful and informative graphs to help you interpret the data. If you’re looking for helpful insights into improving your outdoor athletic training, the Coros Apex is a solid companion.

Price, design, features, and settings

The Apex sits in the middle of the Coros line of watches regarding price and features, between $199.99 and $699.99. Apex is priced at $299.99 for the 42mm model and $349.99 for the 46mm version.

The 42mm model has a stainless steel frame, 1.1-inch color LCD, and three colors: black and grey, gold and purple, or silver and white. The 46mm model has a titanium alloy bezel, a 1.2-inch LCD available in black and grey, midnight black, or white. Both models feature a classic round watch design, sapphire glass lenses and come with a sturdy and comfortable silicone strap.

The silver and white model is my favorite, but Coros sent me the black and gray 42mm for review. Even the smaller 42mm model is a bit bulky for my taste, although my boyfriend thinks the Apex is one of the best-looking fitness trackers he’s seen.

The 42mm model weighs 1.7 ounces, which feels pretty light on my wrist, and the 46mm version is 1.95 ounces. Both are about 0.46 inches thick, making them slightly heavier but about the same thickness as the Garmin Forerunner 735XT, another triathlon-friendly tracker.

For sensors, the Apex has an accelerometer, compass, gyroscope, continuous optical heart rate monitor, barometric altimeter for altimeter, and compass. For navigation, it has GPS and GLONASS satellite connectivity. There’s also a $500 model that adds a Pulse Ox sensor and has a slightly longer battery life.

In terms of water resistance, the Apex has a 10ATM rating, which means it can withstand a depth of 328 feet. Coros says it’s suitable for swimming and water activities but not for deep-water sports like scuba diving. I’ve worn it a few times in the shower, and it’s fine.

The Apex lacks a touchscreen, but you use two physical buttons to navigate the interface on the right side of the circular display. The top is a digital knob/confirmation button, and below is a back button to go back to the previous screen. Navigating the Apex took a bit of getting used to as I’m used to the touchscreen, but it wasn’t difficult once I got used to the digital buttons and knobs.

You can turn the digital knob up and down to see your gadgets, press the confirm button to access the workout menu, and press and hold the back button to enter the Toolbox. Apex has widgets for barometer, heart rate, altitude, temperature, notifications, and activity summaries for the day.
The widgets are filled with information. The activity summary widget shows your calories burned, steps, exercise time, and floors climbed. A bar shows your progress towards your daily calorie goal on the left, and another bar showing your progress towards your exercise time goal.

The heart rate widget shows your current beats per minute, along with a graph of your maximum, minimum, and average heart rate over the past six hours. You can also press the confirm button, then scroll to see your heart rate data for the last 24 hours. The device records your heart rate every 10 minutes during normal use or every second during exercise.
From the Toolbox menu, you can enable Do Not Disturb mode, set alarms, measure your heart rate manually, enable a battery-saving feature called UltraMax, and change the watch face from a few small options. There’s also a 3D compass, timer, stopwatch, maps, and navigation features that let you follow a pre-loaded route on your watch when training or racing in unfamiliar locations.

Apex syncs with many third-party apps, including Strava, TrainingPeaks, Relive, and Final Surge. You can also pair it with an ANT+ heart rate monitor, bike power meter, speed sensor, cadence sensor, and exercise bike.

Setting up the watch and connecting it to your phone and the Coros app is simple. You turn it on by hitting the confirmation button, downloading the Coros app (available for Android and iOS), and creating an account. You enter your gender, date of birth, height, and weight when you create an account.

From there, tap the clock icon at the bottom of the app, select Add New Device, select Apex from the list, and use the in-app QR reader to scan the code on Apex’s screen. Then follow the onscreen instructions to connect the Apex to your phone via Bluetooth, and you’re good to go.

Activity tracking, sleep tracking, battery life

When you set up Apex, the app will ask you to choose your level of exercise (light, medium, or hard) and set your daily calorie and workout goals. I’m the best average runner, so I opted for a light workout and went with the default recommendations of 153 calories and 39 minutes of exercise. If you find your fitness goals too easy, you can change them in the app. When you reach your daily goal, Apex vibrates and displays a congratulatory message on the screen.

During setup, you also choose a bedtime to track your sleep, target heart rate zones, and which apps can push notifications to your watch. For my bedtime, I went to 11 pm, accepted the default heart rate zones (maximum heart rate 184.60 at rest and lactate threshold 160), and enabled notifications for all apps. In testing, Apex did a good job displaying notifications from Coinbase, Slack, and Snapchat.

You can use the Apex to track indoor activities like cardio, spinning, and swimming in the pool, but it’s primarily geared toward outdoor sports. The Apex’s screen looks sharp and stays bright, so you can quickly look down in time without waking it, but it looks best in bright sunlight. Indoors, the screen is a bit dim and dark. Unfortunately, you cannot change the brightness level of the backlight. You can turn it off, but it is it.
Start tracking your workout, press the confirm button, then scroll to select the type of activity you’re doing. There are options for AI trainer, bike, cross-country skiing, GPS cardio, gym cardio, hiking, indoor cycling, indoor running, climbing, multiple sports, underwater swimming, swimming in the pool, running, ski touring, snowboarding, track running, trail running and triathlon.

While tracking your run, Apex displays your distance, speed, and workout time. After every mile, it will vibrate and show your speed. After completing a run, it displays a comprehensive summary of your training on the device itself. Including aerobic and anaerobic training performance, average speed, average stride length average, average and maximum cadence, average and maximum heart rate, best mile time, calories burned, distance, total up and downtime, and total workout time. It also shows how long it will take for you to recover from your workout fully.

The AI ​​trainer section shows your stamina percentage, hours until recovery, and a list of your workouts. You can click on any exercise to see your stats for it. If you like to review your stats after a workout, Apex has a lot to offer.
As for battery life, Coros says the 42mm Apex should last up to 24 days in normal use, 24 hours in full GPS mode, and 80 hours in UltraMax GPS mode, where GPS turns on for 30 seconds every two minutes (the rest at the time, it uses motion sensors and machine learning algorithms to track you). For comparison, the Garmin Forerunner 735XT lasted about 11 days with normal use, 14 hours with GPS, or 24 hours with GPS with a battery-saving feature called UltraTrac, which disables the cadence display, optical heart. The Apex also outlasted the Garmin Vivoactive 3 Music, getting seven days in smartwatch mode and five hours using GPS and Bluetooth music simultaneously.

In testing, Apex’s battery lived up to its promises. After 24 hours, including tracking two runs of about 25 minutes with GPS, the battery only dropped by 10%.

where can you get a Coros Apex online

COROS APEX Premium Multisport GPS Watch – 46mm (Black/Grey): Buy it now

COROS APEX Pro Premium Multisport GPS Watch with Heart Rate and Pulse Ox Monitor, 40h Full GPS Battery, 24/7 Heart Rate Monitoring, Sapphire Glass, Touch Screen, Barometer (Black): Buy it now

Coros APEX Premium Multisport GPS Watch with Heart Rate Monitor, 35h Full GPS Battery, Sapphire Glass, Barometer, ANT+ & BLE Connections, Strava & Training Peaks (Midnight Black|46mm): Buy it now

App Features

While Apex displays impressive stats on the device, its great companion app has even more to it. It displays graphs of your active energy, exercise time, step count, heart rate, sleep, training volume, and fitness level. The sleep graph shows the amount of time you spent in deep and light sleep, as well as your heart rate.

The app records all your workouts and allows you to view them by year and month. It also tracks your total runs, cycles, and swims. You can win a medal for your performance, although I haven’t won a medal yet.

After three runs, the app will populate two additional metrics: your lactate threshold and your threshold speed. According to the app, commonly used by competitive athletes to gauge their training volume and fatigue, the lactate threshold is the point at which lactate begins to build up in the blood faster than it can be eliminated, according to the app application.

Threshold speed is “the fastest speed at which the body does not accumulate significant lactic acid during exercise.” The app says running at your threshold speed “is a great way to increase aerobic fitness and is the key to training for longer runs.” It says my threshold speed is 8 minutes 46 seconds per mile, which seems reasonable.

The app also gives you a Fitness Level score, which considers your lactate threshold, VO2 max (“the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during exercise”), and exercise performance. According to the app, I scored 33.4, which means I’m a recreational athlete and had “some built-in endurance.” The app recommended that I do a training program designed to improve cardiovascular strength.

The Training Load graph shows whether your previous training was Low, Optimized, or Excessive. This cool feature can help you gauge whether you should level up your training or take it down a notch.

You can also use the app to change your watch face. There are many options for you to choose from, some simple and others filled with information. I love that they offer more colorful and eye-catching options to match many styles. I used Illustrator 2, a blue mountain design with my time, date, and step count.

Compare and conclude

If you’re looking for a smartwatch with features like NFC for contactless payments and built-in music storage, the Coros Apex isn’t for you. If you are a triathlete, runner, or endurance athlete looking for a sports watch with built-in sensors that can provide you with loads of data about your performance and suggestions on how to improve your training, Apex is an attractive choice. It offers the same functionality as the Garmin Forerunner 735XT, with better battery life and a more stylish design, making it our Editors’ Choice. That said, if you don’t mind sacrificing battery life, the relatively priced Garmin Vivoactive 3 Music also offers advanced fitness metrics like VO2 max along with smart features like contactless payments and the ability to store songs locally.