2 days ago
Coros Nomad Is A Watch Made For Adventure, Fitness And Even Fishing
Coros has announced what it calls its 'go anywhere, do anything adventure watch,' the Coros Nomad.
In typical adventure watch fashion, the Coros Nomad has a more built-up design than the brand's other watches, with a look similar to that of the Garmin Instinct 3.
The Coros Nomad also has some stand-out features missing from that watch, while costing less. A Nomad retails for $349, but has advanced skills often absent at this level.
For example, the Coros Nomad supports downloadable on-watch maps, including road names, turn-by-turn direction and help navigating back should you stray from a pre-planned route.
You will need to work out the route initially using the Coros phone app or another piece of software that can product a gpx route file, but it's admirably feature-rich.
Coros Nomad Features
The watch needs onboard storage for maps, and the 32GB the Nomad has doubles as space for music. You can connect to Bluetooth headphones. It only supports MP3s, though. You can't download tracks from streaming services you may subscribe to.
The Coros Nomad can also provide not just heart rate and blood oxygenation readings, but ECG too. You can see the panels used as electrodes surrounding the heart rate LEDs, much like those of the Coros Pace Pro.
And it has dual-band L1+L5 GPS, for a stronger location lock in more challenging environments. It's rated for 34 hours of tracking when using this more battery-sapping tracking, and for 22 days of general use, per charge.
Its core capabilities are similar to those of the Coros Pace Pro, which sells at the same price. But there are some important disparities.
This is a slightly larger and much thicker watch, with a 47.8mm diameter and 16.4mm thickness. It also uses a MIP, memory-in-pixel, screen rather than the OLED style rapidly becoming more common among fitness-focused watches.
MIP looks duller, but consumes very little power compared to a lit OLED screen.
Coros's Nomad also has some thoughtful extras that, while they may go unused by many, fit the adventuring remit well. The wearer can record Voice Pins while in an activity by pressing the custiomizable action button. These are like voice notes that become attached to the route map summary in the Coros phone app.
'We built Nomad to help adventurers have a new way to capture memories and experiences, without compromising the high-performance hardware Coros users expect,' says Lewis Wu, Coros CEO.
The raw audio can then be reviewed, or transcribed into text, and a dual-mic array with noise reduction is used for these recordings. There's no speaker on the watch itself to play them back, but the Nomad has plenty of storage space for the task.
Coros aims at campers, hikers and general adventuring with the Nomad, while there are also multiple modes for fishing too:
These let you record your catches, while logging number of casts, your heart rate and , where applicable, speed.
What else is there to know? The Coros Nomad has a mostly polymer plastic casing with an aluminium bezel. And there's a 'digital dial' rotary controller as well as two buttons. The display is a touchscreen too, one covered by toughened 'mineral' glass rather than a branded type like Corning Gorilla Glass.
The Coros Nomad is available to order today. It costs $349 and is available in dark green, dark grey and brown colors.
