COROS  NOMAD

A good sports watch, but bad smart watch

After 8 years with Garmin, I've finally decided it was time for something different. The Coros Nomad immediately grabbed my attention with it's styling and marketing highlighting atypical outdoors activities. While these watches tend to have a lot of supported activity types, it seems like they're typically marketed towards the triathlete wheelhouse (or derivatives thereof). I'm not going to beat around the bush here, the smartwatch features are awful. I think they were added strictly to check a box but no one at Coros actually uses them, they're that bad. The only "smart" feature, as far as I can tell, is it can receive notifications. On paper this is fine, but with the Nomad (and presumably all Coros watches) the notifications aren't mirrored between the phone and watch, they're copied. So, for example, if you get a text message, once you read it on your phone (or just swipe it away), the notification is gone. But that notification will persist on the watch until you also clear it there. The reverse is also true. If you clear a notification on your watch, it'll remain on your phone until you act on it there. There are no actions you can perform for notifications other than clearing them from your watch, contrary to other platforms that may give you some (possibly limited) actions, like sending a canned response or archiving/deleting an email. There are no other typical "smart" functions that I can tell. Coros has a training calendar you can plan activities or see past activities. There is no way to see your regular Android/iOS upcoming calendar events on the watch. There is no app store, and while there are a ton of pre-built watch faces to choose from, there is no real customizing them (the default Nomad watch face, which is the only one I've used so far, does cycle through different widget sets when you press the Back button, which is nice). All that said, as a *smartwatch* I would rate this a 1/5, but that lack of smart features actually is beneficial for why I bought this watch. I wanted something that I could put on, track my activities, then turn it off and switch to my main watch for everything else. And that is exactly what this watch delivers. As far as I can tell, I don't need to wear it 24/7 for its data collection (like some other brands). The sensors are all reasonably accurate (I've not seen any errors or discrepancies in the short time I've had it). The battery life is good (I've just finished my third GPS activity, for a total of 2 hours GPS, and I haven't charged the watch once yet). The combination of a digital crown and touchscreen make for a pretty good user experience, although they're prone to false input if the screen isn't locked (I've disabled the autolock, as I'd rather occasionally scroll back to where I want it than have to deal with unlocking it every time I want to scroll through the pages; although once the novelty has worn off, maybe I will enable the autolock). For the asking price, I think this is a great value and good for its specific utility. Time will tell how it holds up.