18 thoughts on “Coros – 2022 Feature Insights – Another World First”

1. Cleaning up the structured workouts is a good fix. The rest being attached to a run segment was annoying. The GAP data field seems really useful too especially for the ‘non power’ users. Love how COROS keeps moving the ball forward.

2. Coros agility at delivering updates and supporting old hardware is a serious brand differentiator.

   I don’t get the Core temperature thing. This is very niche. Didn’t it exist as a ConnectIQ field for a while? It doesn’t have to be native because Garmin has a 3rd party extensibility model that Coros, Suunto, and Polar don’t have. Coros has to implement it themselves because they have a monolithic system that doesn’t support plugins.

   The main reason this is an issue for Garmin and power is that data fields can’t plug into structured workouts so you can’t do a power-based run workout. It’s also goofy because Stryd acts as an ANT+ power meter and Garmin has the exact feature as a cycling activity and it works if you run with a bike activity. So it arguably seems like spite or some kind of strategery that they didn’t just enable the cycling code in the running profile.

   1. hi
      yes i think that’s all righht there/
      1. There IS work on changing the ant+ profile specs and core temp will be on that. i think wahoo then will support it natively. there are at least two and probably 3 more companies that will then support it in short order. once it is a NATIVE spec it increases vendor adoption (and presumably usage)
      2. yes there is ciq and apple watch compatibility on CORE
      3. The anecdote with Coros is that they met the Core guys and got their coders working overnight and literally had something working the next morning that linked the two. so, yes it’s probably a monolithic architecture but some agility on the developers front seemed to work wonders. anyway, as with all these things, there would then have been while to get all the hard and intricate bits working.

      1. If

3. Perhaps off topic but.. While I’d live to give Coros a try I can’t due to lack of Nfc/payment method. Its a comfort knowing I’ve a payment method on my wrist that may work if smartphone or pocket fail..

   1. interestingly i keep asking at restaurants how many people use watches to pay. it’s consistently about 1 in 100 (I’m one of those people)

      1. Ask them how many people use Apple Pay. My experience is that is how people call tap to pay — at least in the States.

      2. yes but they use their phones for that. at least in my sample size of 10 or so uk restaurants

      3. In DC till operators would call my fenix an Apple Watch for Apple Pay and they wanted to know which Apple Watch it was. In Cape Town and Johannesburg everyone calls it tap to pay and nobody batted an eye at using a Garmin watch to do it. The concept of tap to pay is nearly ubiquitous and while having a smart watch to do payment wasn’t the most common thing it wasn’t super-novel either. The concept isn’t tied to Apple in people’s minds like it was in DC.

         But in any case usage and lingo was regionalized. 1/3 of the people walking around in DC seem to have an Apple Watch and payment with that or the phone is commonplace. Cape Town seems to have a lot more Garmin than Apple floating around but credit cards are not as ubiquitous locally as in the States or EU. People mostly have debit cards and the point of payment gadgets all ask if you want “direct” or “budget”. (Budget is some kind of common installment plan system where you pay interest to your bank.) They sell Apple Store and Play Store top up cards in supermarket, pharmacy, and convenience stores along with mobile phone pre-paid minutes cards as a result of the low penetration of credit.

4. Why oh why aren’t they updating their wellness aspects like sleep namely? And something better with HRV. And do you still have to run 300 steady state minutes to activate evolab? That was another issue

   1. With the new firmware, all hilly roads will be included in EvoLab calculation. Generally, now people only need to run 1-2 hours to unlock it.

   2. I wonder to what extent this is antithetical to their power management. It seems like one of their strategies is having a fairly low sampling frequency for HR in watch mode.

      1. I made a switch to Vertix 2 a month ago. And it’s exactly that – COROS gets long battery just because of very low sampling frequency of HR outside activities. Watch has two modes – either do a measurement once in 10 minutes or be in continuous mode just like Garmin. Initially, I went for the HR all the time. And Vertix battery started draining very rapidly. I was wearing Vertix on one hand and Enduro on other and Vertix consumed 6-8% on average per day vs. Enduro 4-5%. When I switched Vertix to the low sampling rate, the consumption was at the level or slightly better than Enduro depending on the day.
         So, no magic, just turn off HR sensor and you good to go for a long time 😀

      2. ‼️

         Nobody mentions this ever. What is the use of 10 minute sampling? Might as well be off and save more ?.

         ? vs ?

      3. This was also a big (negative?) surprise to me and I had some e-mail chat with COROS support on this. Yes, I can switch to continuous HR monitoring, but there is no use of that as the watch only stores HR samples with 10 minute interval anyway. COROS actually don’t have any metrics that reply on HR reading except recovery HR in their EvoLabs stats. The negative of once-every-10-minute reading is that this metric is highly volatile and thus unreliable (as none of 10 minute reading might happen while I’m at rest, or just can’t be taken for some reason).
         Garmin measures recovery HR during the sleep (if watch is worn while sleeping) while COROS does it during the day and marks lowest HR reading as the resting HR. This sound a bit so-so to me. Nevertheless I can see my lowest HR reading during the sleep and monitor that instead (but it goes in no metrics).

5. I really am a fan of native Sensor support. But if Ray is right and the Core data isn’t stored in the .fit file dev fields but proprietary, it’s kind of pointless behause it is stuck in the Coros App. In the while, even if it is impressive when it’s the result of an overnighter, it also looks like a result of an overnighted. Nevertheless I’m always impressed with Coros really fast development to a serious competitor on that marked.

   I hope ANT+ workgroup starts moving a bit faster, but using only Garmin devices make it hurt a lot less.

   Maybe you can give the CORE Devs a small nudge that they need to recompile their ConnectIQ datafield to support my Epix 🙂

   Funny that they enabled saving pool temp shortly after Garmin disabled it. Like if they just want to pinch them a bit on that issue.

   1. yes all the ciq devs everywhere are burning the midnight oil ! I spoke with core this morning as it happens

      Coros app: i mean the data is clearly in the coros app and their platform. i had a look at a FIT file and they follow FIT2.0 format. however, as you/Ray say, there are no extra bits in there. However I would think it is trivial for Coros to add developer fields if they wanted to.
      I would say CORE is a ‘pro’ sensor and almost certainly its data will often be needed to be exported to other platforms.

6. “and I now think that Polar and Suunto really do have something to worry about.”

   WRT Suunto (can’t speak to Polar, never had one of their watches) I’ve been convinced of this since I made the switch almost 18 months ago. And every firmware update since then has only borne me out. 🙂

Comments are closed.