Last November we reviewed the Coros Pace 4, and it turned into one of the most surprising watches we tested in the last year. For its size, price, and features, its the one we rarely take off unless we’re checking out a different brands next big thing.

Long term though, the thing that always held the Pace 4 back was the materials. The size fit our wrist perfectly. The display was good. But next to its competitors, it just felt cheap. But for a $249 watch, we let it slide.

So when the Pace 4 Pro showed up a few weeks ago, we we’re excited to see just how Pro, Coros would take the new Pace. How far would it improve on the body and for the love of all things fitness, please replace that strap we hated so, so, much.

And they did. The main selling points of the Pace 4 Pro is that its upgraded to a titanium bezel, sapphire glass and the largest display of any Coros watch yet. On top of a growing pile of other tech, like AI-assisted training plans, that we honestly haven’t dug into yet, they keep nailing the basics too.

First Impressions

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The first thing you notice right out of the box is how much sturdier this feels compared to its predecessor. It has some weight to it, in a good way — much like going from a Timex to a Rolex. It’s noticeable, and given the price tag, it better feel that way.

Next, as you power it on and start setting it up, you see just how hard Coros is pushing voice. If you want to start a workout or record how one went, the watch steers you toward voice memos instead of scrolling through buttons. This isn’t new for the company — Coros talked about this exact direction when the Pace 4 launched, starting with voice notes right after a workout. We’re fans of the concept, and we use voice memos ourselves to capture how a session went in real time. But it also feels more like a feature than a difference-maker that sets the brand apart, and asking millions of athletes to rewire how they’ve used a sports watch for years is a colossal ask. Will it work, and will athletes go the way of voice? It’s a big ask, even for a good idea.

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The included nylon band is a great upgrade. It dries fast, unlike the nylon band on our WHOOP, which stays damp after a swim or shower and gets your clothes wet every single time. It also fixes one of our biggest ongoing complaints with the standard Pace 4: that latch sucked. It would pop undone constantly — anything that caused friction, from putting our hand in a pocket to reaching under a pillow at night, and it didn’t matter: it would unclip and flap around. Annoying every time. The new nylon band with its Velcro closure has held up well so far, though we’re not yet sure how those five Velcro pieces will hold up over the long haul. Something we’re paying attention to.

And then, the size. The slightly larger display has a nice size to it too. At 1.47 inches, it’s certainly not overpowering for us small-wristers — it feels like our sweet spot without screaming “I’m in Special Forces or a cop.” The Pace 4 Pro is even better than what we thought was already our favorite. The size is right, and the upgraded display is stunning too.

🔥 Here’s What Works

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The Screen is the Story. At 1.47 inches with a 466×466 resolution, it’s 22.5% bigger than the Pace 4’s and the largest display Coros has ever put on a watch, outsizing even the Pace Pro. With Sapphire glass, it is also a first for the Pace line, and a real PRO step up from the mineral glass that scuffed easily on the standard Pace 4. Peak brightness hits 3,500 nits, and it’ll dim all the way down to 2 nits when we’re in our daughters bedroom trying to see if we can escape, without waking her.

The Band, Finally Solved. This may feel like such a small thing but it fixes a real, everyday annoyance from the Pace 4. The new nylon band is quick-drying and stays secure. It’s also a standard 22mm quick-release, so it’s compatible with most of your other Coros or watches in your collection.

Titanium & Sapphire. If you’re going to call something PRO, this is almost a must in 2026 and the titanium bezel and sapphire display are stunning but here’s the kicker. Coros somehow kept the weight almost identical to the plastic Pace 4. At just 43g with the nylon band, the PRO is only 11 grams heavier despite the material and screen upgrades.

Dedication to AI Coaching. As an endurance coach myself, I’ll die on the hill that no AI coaching will ever beat a human but I have to commend Coros on the time and investment their making in the space. The company calls it, Coros MCP and its a way for athletes to connect your training data to Claude or ChatGPT. It’s not just about asking a chatbot to summarize your training but it can actually write a workout based on your freshness, training load, and goals, and hand it back to you ready to sync straight to the watch through the Coros Training Hub. Most athletes who coach themselves burn hours of time each week just programming sessions into an app. If Coros gets this fully dialed in, that friction mostly disappears. Side note. This isn’t Pace 4 Pro exclusive but works across the Coros lineup.

That Bigger Battery. After time, was was another knock with the Pace 4. When we locked in on training, we found the battery was needing a charge every 14 days or so. The Pace 4 Pro highlights 60 hours in High GPS mode (all systems) and 46 hours with always-on display which is nearly 50% more than the Pace 4. Daily-use battery runs a claimed 21 days which we’ve found pretty accurate so far. Coros even notes that they ran the math on an Ironman finish where an athlete started at 100%, finished in 12-hours and still had roughly 45% left.

😷 Here’s What Stinks

The Push to Voice. We like the differentiating feature and that Coros is pushing it but we just don’t know if its a feature that is a selling point. Like we said, we’ve gotten comfortable with voice logging as an option but trying to make it a default path through the menu asks a huge base of athletes to relearn muscle memory they’ve built over years. This should be a feature you opt into, not one the watch steers you toward at every turn.

Indoor Run Pacing. This one kills me but running on a treadmill is just a way of life for any busy person and unfortunately we find ourselves on it 4x a week. And one thing that has always killed us about Coros is how off their ‘indoor run’ pacing is. It’s such a disappointment to know you’re running a 10 minute mile to only look down and have your watch saying you’re at 7:41/mile. So much of their software is so good, yet this one still falls flat.

No Streaming Music. This one still kills us because the watch does have more RAM making the Pro 4 the perfect watch to finally launch the ability to stream music. We asked about this directly, and the honest answer from Coros is that it’s not entirely in their hands. Lots of players and partners but the end result is no music. There is also no NFC or contactless payment either, instead Coros is still prioritizing battery life over adding those features.

Long-term Band Durability. The velcro closure feels solid out of the gate but I don’t know how well it will hold up. It’s a big improvement and fits nicely snug on our wrist but we’ll see if the sun, sweat, pool chemicals, showers, and everything else eats away at this strap. Then of course, it all connects and holds together by 5 small glued-on pieces of velcro. We just don’t have enough time with it yet to tell you it’ll hold up six months from now.

Real Life with the Pace 4 Pro

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If we need to point out just one thing, its the display. It is the first and last thing you notice with this watch. Coros put real thought into where the extra screen-estate goes, giving you up to 11 data fields at once, or a new multi-data activity page that pushes it to 13. The Pace 4 had us squinting and this solves that outright.

And with twice the RAM of the Pace 4, the mapping is so much better. Like night and day better, allowing you to pan and zoom pretty effortlessly with the turn of the dial. It definitely feels noticeably snappier, especially when you’re in the middle of Austin trails, dripping sweat, and lost. No seriously. We love the map function for this reason but hated it on the original Pace 4. It was like using dial-up internet when compared to the Pro.

A detail we didn’t expect and we’re pleasantly surprised about is that the digital dial itself is metal and doubles as an ECG contact point for wellness checks. If it were a plastic dial, you couldn’t get a closed-loop reading. Coros also added a pulse oximeter alongside the existing heart rate and stress tracking, so you’re getting a fuller wellness picture than the Pace 4 offers, not just a bigger screen. Additions we quite like.

For context, we haven’t just worn this watch, we’ve lived in it for the past few weeks, including a trip to Runningman Festival where we spent three days seeing just how the battery held up. Additionally, we put it through thirteen mile runs, ten-mile runs, swims, and yes, a beer mile.

We charged it to 100% the day it arrived and after all the above mentioned, we’re still sitting at 64%. But at this point, let’s be honest, battery life in high end watches need to be good and it’s an industry standard, so unless it’s wildly inefficient, battery to us just isn’t a huge selling point anymore.

The one thing we’re still waiting on is a multi-point thermal sensor Coros built into the hardware but hasn’t turned on yet — it’s there for future skin-temp tracking, the kind of thing Oura Ring leans on for women’s health and cycle tracking. Nothing to test yet, but worth knowing it’s coming.

Pace 4 Pro vs. Pace 4

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The headline upgrade is materials, titanium and sapphire instead of the plastic and mineral glass that made the original Pace 4 feel a step behind its price-matched competition.

Coros CEO Lewis Wu called it “a big step forward in hardware design for COROS.” Overall, the screen is 22.5% larger, and battery life is up almost 50%, for just 11 extra grams. The nylon band alone fixes one of our most-repeated complaints from the last review: that constantly-popping rubber latch.

But then there is the ultimate trade-off. The tradeoff is price and the real consideration. Pace 4 was so great because it was loaded with features at $249. This is a $449 watch. The open question mark that carries over from last time is voice: COROS was already leaning into it in November, and with the Pro, it’s no longer a feature sitting in a menu — it’s the path the watch wants you on by default.

What to Know

• Price: $449 USD ($619 CAD / €449 / £389 / AU $779)
• Materials: Titanium bezel, sapphire glass display
• Display: 1.47″ AMOLED, 466×466 resolution, up to 3,500 nits.
• Weight: 43g with nylon band (11g more than Pace 4)
• Thickness: 11.8mm (~13mm including PPG sensor)
• Battery Life: 60 Hours of GPS Tracking (46 hours with Always On Display)
• Battery (Daily Use): 21 days / 7 days with Always-On Display
• Charging: USB-C with the included COROS dongle
• Storage: RAM: 32GB (2x the RAM of Pace 4)
• Sensors: 4th-gen optical HR (5-channel PPG), ECG, pulse oximeter (SpO2), dual-frequency GPS, barometer, thermometer, multi-point thermal (hardware-only at launch)
• Voice: Built-in speaker + mic — voice pins, voice training notes, hands-free calling (requires connected phone)
• Connectivity: No NFC/contactless payment; no confirmed music streaming. Syncs to Strava, Nike Run Club, TrainingPeaks
• Bands: 22mm quick-release
• Release Date: September 22, 2026

Verdict

The Pace 4 Pro is definitely the grown up version of our favorite watch and it fixes the one thing that kept us from fully falling for the standard Pace 4: the materials.

And then it goes one step further, with the biggest, brightest display Coros has ever shipped and a battery that really didn’t make it much thicker.

It’s still just as thin and just as refined.

But the beauty of the original was, we could call it a disruptor because it gave you a ton at a great price, but at $449, this watch is no longer the budget disruptor the Pace 4 was — it’s now squarely competing with the mid-tier competition which puts it in a tougher place.

Should You Buy It?

Like so many things in life, the question you need to be asking yourself is, what will I use this for because the materials alone don’t justify $200 more than the Pace 4. Titanium and sapphire feel great on the wrist, but “it feels more premium” isn’t a $200 argument on its own.

What does justify it is everything underneath the materials. If the Pace 4 display was too small, well, the screen isn’t just bigger, it’s more usable. You don’t really need to concentrate to see your pace or mile time, a quick glance is sufficient enough.

If mapping is important, you get double the RAM and faster mapping. The sensors are improved too, with pulse ox and ECG on top of what the Pace 4 already had.

And the battery isn’t a marginal bump but nearly 50% more GPS life, and after two weeks of real training plus a full festival weekend, we’re still sitting on two-thirds of a charge.

So who should spend the extra $200? If you’re the athlete who’s out there for hours at a time doing ultras, Ironman or just really hate charging — or you lean on mapping and navigation more than the average road runner, the Pro is a, yes. The RAM and battery gains aren’t a want or need for that person. I’ve personally never met anyone who starts with mapping and RAM first but they’re probably out there.

But if you’re mostly running road miles under two hours and checking your pace and HR, the standard Pace 4 still does that job at nearly half the cost, and we wouldn’t talk you out of it.

Our call is that we loved the disruptor tag with the original Pace 4. This isn’t that but for $449, if you’re in the market for an upgrade, want premium materials that will last you years, pull the trigger because this might just be the best Coros watch yet.

For everyone else, the Pace 4 remains the smarter buy.