Coros gives its Fenix rival stronger GPS powers but weaker heart tracking skills
The Coros Vertix 2S does make some improvements on the Vertix 2 to make it a better outdoor watch, with the GPS accuracy boost the biggest reason to make that upgrade. It still offers great battery performance in spite of the drop in overall numbers. If you're looking for a climbing-centric outdoor watch, then the Vertix 2S will appeal, but there doesn't seem to be quite enough as a package to make it the standout outdoor watch to buy right now.
Pros
Cons
The Cors Vertix is the company’s answer to the Garmin Fenix – and it’s back with a revamped Vertix 2S. You get improved dual-band GPS support, and a new optical heart rate sensor.
It’s a rugged outdoors watch that offers the best that Coros has to offer in tracking and training features. And promises the kind of battery life that offers support for multi-day expeditions.
In a crowded market, does the Vertix 2S offer enough to make it a worthy upgrade on the Vertix 2? And is it a better outdoor watch than what Garmin and company can serve up?
I got sweaty with the Vertix 2S to find out.
Price and competition
The Coros Vertix 2s was officially announced in April 2024, and it’s sticking to the same price as its predecessor. It costs $699/£599 with the Vertix 2 now dropping to $599/£519.
That puts it firmly in the premium outdoor watch bracket. That means it goes up against the Garmin Fenix 7 (£519), Garmin Fenix 7 Pro review (£649) and the Suunto Vertical (£545).
Key features
- £599 / $699
- 43-hours Dual-Band GPS battery – extends to 118 hours in GPS mode only
- All-systems dual-frequency GPS
- 1.4-inch, 280 x 280, always-on memory LCD screen
- Touchscreen and button controls
- Size: 50.3mm x 50.3mm x 16mm
- Weight: 70-87g
- ECG and Pulse Oximeter
- Offline TOPO Maps
- Notifications and music player
- Multisport modes with outdoor and indoor climbing mode
- Bluetooth 5.1
- Interchangeable straps
- Waterproof up to 100m
Design and display
The Vertix 2S is huge – even compared to the Garmin Fenix, Suunto Vertical and the Polar Grit X2 Pro.
Coros sticks to a 50.3mm-sized case that’s now even thicker, up to 16mm from 15.7mm. However, it’s lighter than the Vertix 2, with either the 26mm silicone or nylon strap.
I found it really cumbersome and there was no way I’d wear it to bed. But it has a reassuring build and can take a serious bashing. The sapphire glass protects the screen from scratches and the titanium alloy bezel is also resistant to scratches.
Coros sticks to three physical buttons, with a twisting dial one in the center that lets you scroll through menus.
It’s also got the same sized screen and resolution but it’s not AMOLED. So the LCD falls behind the latest Garmins, and of course, the Apple Watch Ultra 2.
The 1.4-inch, 280 x 280 resolution, always-on LCD display lacks color and vibrancy. But it certainly makes up for it with sharp contrast and screen clarity. And the lower resolution display is way kinder on battery life.
That screen does support touchscreen functionality, but it’s a slower, haptic-style feedback when you swipe through menu screens. You need to value the Vertix 2S’s longevity and tracking to put up with these trade-offs in design.
If you liked the big, brash look of the Vertix 2, the 2S is the same. But it’s not tempting us away from a Garmin Epix Gen 2 with this look and feel.
Sports tracking and features
The headline news is the sensors that are packed into the Vertix 2S. Coros has improved the heart rate sensor, which it introduced on the Coros Pace 3 and the Coros Apex 2 Pro watches.
There are 5 LEDS and four photodetectors, and this same array drove good performance on the Pace 3 compared to the Pace 2. But as we’ll come on to, this didn’t bear fruit in our testing.
Coros retains the dual-frequency mode it introduced on the Vertix 2. But it’s tweaked the antenna design to improve outdoor tracking accuracy.
Sports profiles
The Vertix 2S like other Coros watches is a multisport watch at heart. It’s packed with profiles for runs, rides and swimming sessions. There’s pretty much every sport profile going.
Coros goes big on climbing with dedicated metrics for multi-pitch and big wall climbing, indoor climbs and bouldering.
But whatever you’re training for, there are lots of metrics to dig into.
You can follow training plans and build workouts and download ones from Coros’ website. I liked the new muscle heat map that helps ensure you’re working both the upper and lower body.
You also get training load and training status insights, recommended recovery times, and a running fitness score for runners. It will also generate race predictions from 5km to the marathon distance. These are delivered via Garmin-esque widgets, which offers glanceable information on your training. I felt right at home, and data-focused users will love the experience.
My insights felt in line with my Polar and Garmin scores, particularly for elements like training load and predictions. But I still think presentation of that data on the watch could be made more engaging and useful.
Sleep tracking and insights
If you want to use the Vertix 2S to track your daily activity or sleep, then it can do that too. I found it reliable on the whole, tested against Oura Ring Gen 3.
The sleep tracking focuses on capturing duration, heart rate and sleep stages. The sleep duration stats were generally reliable, and average heart rate data also stacked up against Oura.
Sleep stages were generally in line with the Oura, with slightly longer deep sleep recorded on some nights. Unlike Whoop, Garmin or Oura these aren’t central to the experience.
Coros also doesn’t focus on the sleep or HRV like other wearables. Garmin now uses HRV and sleep data to report on Readiness, which is something the top wearables are focusing on. Whoop and Oura also lead the way here, and moving to Coros makes the Vertix feel less useful after all.
Most Garmin watches in the Vertix 2S’s price bracket offer Training Readiness and recovery insights.
Mapping and navigation
Coros offers both landscape and topographic maps, with the former preloaded and the latter needing to be downloaded from the Coros website. You can also create routes on the Coros app to then sync over to the watch after and it’s thankfully a pretty straightforward thing to do.
The map screen can be added to workouts, which wasn’t always the case on Coros watches and it makes using mapping more useful. But the touchscreen functionality to swipe through maps is slow an laborious, like it is on some of Garmin’s watches.
You do have the ability to use a back to the start mode and for created routes you can turn on turn-by-turn navigation as long as you’re in running or trail running mode.
I found the mapping and navigation is very good overall on the Vertix 2S and not too dissimilar from the Vertix 2. While the screen isn’t colour, it’s certainly clear enough to make out mapping elements while being able to preview waypoints on your route works well too.
I found the experience comparable to the likes of Suunto, Polar and Apple (via third party apps) for mapping and navigation support – although I do feel Garmin is now ahead with its turn-by-turn navigation and modes like UpAhead and ClimbPro. As with so much of the Coros experience, Garmin just seems to offer marginally better executed features – but this time at the same price point.
GPS accuracy
Coros introduced its dual-frequency mode as its answer to the dual-band GPS modes we’ve seen from Apple, Garmin, and others that have embraced this new ability to communicate to multiple satellite systems over multiple frequency bands. In my time with the original Vertix 2, I found that it wasn’t noticeably better than a normal five-channel GPS, and wasn’t worth forking out the extra money.
And thankfully, Coros has listened and made improvements.
Things have changed for the better on the Vertix 2S and Coros adjusting the antenna design has done the trick.
I’ve been testing it against similar dual-band modes available on the Garmin Epix Pro and the Polar Grit X2 Pro, and the tracking of distance in real-time did generally sit nice and close to those other watches. I tested it against the Epix Pro and Apple Watch Ultra 2, and found a strong performance on the Vertix 2S.
Heart rate tracking problems
Sadly, the same cannot be said about the performance of the optical heart rate monitor.
Coros is using a similar sensor setup used on its Pace 3 and Apex Pro 2 watches, and has stated that adding this new sensor has resulted in a drop in battery life.
Whether it’s the sheer size of the watch on my skinny wrist leading to a poor connection, the sensor technology itself, or maybe a combination of the two, the Vertix 2S’s optical heart rate sensor accuracy didn’t perform well when we compared it to a Polar H10 and Garmin HRM-Pro+ heart rate monitor chest strap.
Even on some easy and steadier paced workouts the heart rate in real-time felt weirdly high.
And the problems aren’t limited to your run in realtime.
Heart rate data drives so much of the training analysis and insights that it makes other elements of the Coros Vertix 2S feel unreliable. And once that trust has been broken, it’s hard to see past question marks over the data.
You do have the ability to pair external sensors to it over Bluetooth only as there’s no ANT+ support here like there was on the original Vertix. If you care about accurate heart rate, that’s the way to go. But it makes it hard to recommend the Vertix 2S overall.
Battery life
Typically you’d expect a new iteration of a watch series to bring better battery life, but interestingly that’s not the case for the Vertix 2S. The addition of the new heart rate sensor means there’s actually a drop in absolute battery numbers.
In daily use, Coros promises 40 days, which drops from 43 days on the Vertix 2. Add in stress tracking and that drops to 36 days (down from 39 days). It’s still decent overall.
When outdoor tracking with full GPS mode only, battery is down from 127 hours to 118 hours. Using the more-accurate dual-frequency mode drops from 49 hours down to 43 hours.
In our testing, the Vertix 2S has been a watch that’s comfortably lasted a couple of weeks from a full charge and absolutely has the capability to go longer than that, depending on what GPS mode you’re using along with lighter use of its smartwatch features.
An hour of outdoor tracking with the most accurate dual-frequency mode in use saw battery drop by just 2% to give you a sense of how good the battery life remains in spite of the dropped numbers compared to the Vertix 2.
Compare that to a similarly priced Fenix or Suunto Vertical, and Coros still holds its own here with a great battery usage mode to give you a good sense of how much battery you have to play with.
Smart features
If you’re looking for the best outdoor watch with smartwatch features, this isn’t the watch for you. This smartwatch support remains the same as the Vertix 2.
You can view your phone notifications, though it’s not the most polished support in terms of presenting them on the watch screen, as you can see above.
There is a built-in music player, but it lacks the music streaming service support you get on Garmin watches, so that means dragging and dropping on your own music via a computer.
You can use it to control compatible GoPro and Insta360 action cameras and there’s useful find my phone and watch modes here as well. There’s no payments or app store, though there is rich third party app support to share data with other platforms including Strava, Komoot, Apple Health and Stryd.
The features that are here generally work without issue, the smartwatch experience simply doesn’t compare to what you’ll get on a Garmin Fenix or the Apple Watch Ultra.
