As is always the case in sports tech, September can be full of surprises. But I’m pretty sure nobody had this on their bingo card. COROS has just announced that existing Pace 4 watches will get a firmware update allowing the same level of mapping as the rest of COROS’s watches. That’s a massive shift, not just for COROS, but for some of their competitors as well. Historically speaking, we haven’t seen offline mapping at this price point before from the endurance-focused companies (e.g. Garmin/COROS/Suunto/Polar/etc). We have seen it from the smartwatch-focused companies (Apple/Samsung/Google), but the maps/routing there is quite a bit different than the endurance-focused ones.
In any case, COROS has announced that as of today, the Pace 4 gets full offline mapping, just like the COROS Pace Pro or COROS Nomad, or any other COROS device with mapping. The Pace 4 previously had breadcrumb-style routing (so you could follow courses/routes), but below the breadcrumb trail it was simply blank, like this:
Now, you’ll get a full map below it, like this:
As with other COROS devices, this is a so-called “non-routable” map, meaning it’s effectively a static image that’s presented below your route. As such, you can’t create-routes or re-route on-device, that has to come from some other platform (the COROS app, Strava Routes, Komoot, etc…). But, for most scenarios, this is perfectly fine. And it includes topographic details as well.
In the case of the COROS Pace 4, the only real limiter here is the size of storage, which is 4GB (as compared to 32GB on the Pace Pro or 32GB on the COROS Nomad). This limits just how much map data you can download offline. However, because of the way COROS does map sections, you don’t have to download an entire continent like Garmin, so you can be a bit more particular in what you spend your GB’s on. Note that on my watch, 2.3GB out of 4GB was already used by ‘Other’ (which doesn’t include maps/workouts/audio/routes).
For context, here are some random map sizes I just checked (it’s somewhat imprecise, because tiles overlap other countries):
– Germany: ~1.1GB
– Spain (mainland): ~780MB
– UK & Ireland: ~580MB
– California: ~330MB
– Colorado: ~225MB
– South Africa: ~300MB
– Japan: ~550MB
– Mallorca: 14.5MB
In other words, it’s pretty easy to stay within the available space for any given trip, especially if you’re able to be particular about which map tiles you need:
In terms of map speed, I’m not seeing any meaningful difference to a COROS Nomad device I have handy. Both enumerate the map tiles at basically the same speed. However, I did find that the map didn’t update fast (or even correctly) while rotating the watch/my body, whereas the COROS Nomad was instant. Both have magnetic compasses (3D compasses), so I expect this is probably just a beta bug that needs to be sorted out.
COROS says that once enabled on your Pace 4, the mapping functionality is identical to that of the Pace Pro watch. There are, of course, still other differences there like battery life, display size, case bits, etc…
In any event, if you want to try it out, COROS is letting anyone start downloading maps to their Pace 4 starting today in public beta. Seems like the perfect thing to do for the weekend ahead. Well, unless you have a big race, in which case, never install new software the night before a big race.
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