COROS APEX PRO

£449.99 Tough, lightweight smartwatch

Coros first made its name in cycling with its smart helmet range, featuring integrated lights and bone-conduction speakers built into the straps for safe audio accompaniment to your ride. More recently the company has been making waves in the multi-sport and running domain releasing this tough smartwatch to rival Garmin’s dominance in the smart sportswatch market.

The watch boasts a host of built-in sensors to satisfy data geeks: an optical heart-rate monitor along with a pulse oximeter, barometric altimeter, accelerometer, compass, gyroscope and thermometer. As you’d expect, it also has plenty of functions. If your active lifestyle strays beyond cycling then the APEX Pro probably has a function for it as it supports a whole gamut of sports including openwater swimming, snowboarding and cross-country skiing, along with more popular sports, such as running (indoor, trail, track) and triathlon. You control the many functions via the two side buttons and the bezel, which also rotates to scroll through functions. The backlit touchscreen works within route navigation to scroll around your course, or to flick between graphs during workouts.

What really impresses with the APEX Pro is the battery life. It’ll run for 30 days working as a regular watch, or for over a claimed 40 hours in full GPS mode – we’ve logged more than 650km so far of GPS-recorded cycling without the need to charge it. If you run it in UltraMax mode (which switches GPS on and o , monitoring 30 seconds out of every 120) you can record over a claimed 100 hours of continuous GPS activity tracking. The built-in GPS gains its signal from GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou satellites for accurate positioning wherever you are. We would suggest that it works better as a tracker than a navigation tool. You can navigate to a breadcrumb trail by either turning a previous workout into a route, by uploading a .GPX file from the Coros app or, alternatively, by exporting a Strava route to the Coros app.

The APEX Pro is reasonably light for its size at 58.1g – the sleek titanium alloy bezel is 47mm in diameter – and it has a soft silicone strap, which is hypoallergenic and incredibly comfortable to wear.