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Coros Pace 4 smartwatch review: A capable and affordable fitness tracker

The Coros Pace 4 packs lots of features into a small and light fitness tracker. It's not perfect, but it could make the ideal first serious smartwatch for workouts.

ScienceBy Wire ServicesFebruary 24, 20264 min read

Last updated: April 3, 2026, 6:19 PM

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 Coros Pace 4 smartwatch review: A capable and affordable fitness tracker

The Coros Pace 4 provides a lot of features and generally solid accuracy at a sensible price. It’s one of the best options for those looking for a capable but affordable fitness tracker.

  • +Competitively priced
  • +Long battery life
  • +Light and relatively slim
  • +Advanced stats without a big outlay
  • -Some minor heart rate accuracy issues
  • -Interface could do with a spruce-up
  • -Garmin offers more versatile training features
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  • Best fitness trackers for beginners 2025: From Apple Watch to Garmin Forerunner 165

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Jump to: Design and screen Features Performance Verdict Related products How we tested The last couple of years have seen a key trend emerge among fitness and running watches. Many more of them now use bright, colorful OLED screens, and the Coros Pace 4 marks the most affordable of Coros’s watches to get onboard.

Flashier display aside, the Pace 4 keeps all the key draws of the Coros Pace 3. It’s not hugely expensive, the battery lasts a good long while, it’s very comfortable and feature-wise it’s highly competitive with a comparable Garmin watch, like the Forerunner 165.

What’s missing or could be improved? The Coros Pace 4 does not have the glossiest-looking interface, and while sound its heart rate reliability isn’t quite top-tier, particularly when you stray away from the basics of running and hiking.

Coros Pace 4 smartwatch review

Coros Pace 4: Design and screen

  • Light and relatively slender
  • Has an OLED screen, a first for this series
  • 5ATM water resistance can’t handle diving

Display: 1.2-inch AMOLED, 390 x 390

Dimensions (in): 1.7 x 1.7 x x 0.46

Dimensions (mm): 43.4 x 43.4 x 11.8

Weight (without strap): 1.4 oz (40 g)

Compatibility: Android and iOS

The Coros Pace 4 represents a bunch of factors you may not think of immediately when shopping for a watch, but probably should. These are low weight, a slim form factor and — not unrelated — simple comfort.

This watch is slimmer than most runner’s watches and weighs just 40g. What it doesn’t have is a flashy design.

The Coros Pace 4’s body is plastic, as are the side buttons and the crown. There’s a sense of design deliberation in the subtle two-tone finish, but this is not a luxury watch. It’s a practical one. And the crown, the control dial, does look a bit toy-like, decked out in grey plastic.

Its screen uses an unspecified kind of mineral glass rather than a Corning type or Sapphire. But now weeks into testing, the casing still looks great and I am yet to scratch the screen. There’s no raised lip above the screen, though, which can help further avoid scrapes if you plan on giving your watch a load of punishment.

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And like just about every good watch in this class, the Coros Pace 4 has 5ATM water resistance. It’s good enough for pool swimming but is “not for diving” as Coros highlights on its own spec sheet.

While the Pace 4’s crown looks a little cheap, it is also one part that makes the watch stand out. It turns smoothly, and is used to glide down menus. Coros has also given the watch surprisingly good haptics, with scrolling accompanied by little clicks.

The Coros Pace 4’s lead feature is its screen, though. It has an OLED display, where the Pace 3 and older models had boring-looking but practical MIP ones. We’re seeing the same trend here as Garmin has adopted. Now that AMOLED screens are pretty energy efficient, companies like Coros can give us a brighter, sharper, more colorful appearance without killing battery life.

It’s a good example of this kind of screen, too. It’s a 1.2-inch, 390 x 390 screen with peak brightness of an impressive 1,500 nits. Coros, ever a battery life fiend, is quite careful with how hard it pushes brightness so that power doesn’t leap off the display in the way that a Garmin Forerunner 570’s, for example, does. But the brightness is there for those super-bright environments where it’s really needed.

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