Coros Dura Computer and Heart Rate Monitor

Not All Those Who Wander Know Where They Are...

My father would never admit to getting lost. Sniffing through the air like a hound on a track, he would lead us into the depths of uncertainty like he meant to take us there.

Asking for directions? "That's for the weak, if we don't know where we are going, how can we be lost?" was his answer most of the time. My dad and I went on quite a few adventures when I was growing up. We walked around the back alleys and narrow streets of Istanbul for days trying to discover the multi-layered city that the guidebooks don't show you. We trekked through the mountains and the meadows of the country armed with nothing more than local lore and vague directions and made it out without a casualty. All this wandering around made me a pretty good route finder in my old age. Never mind the 6 mapping apps on my phone that help me plan and execute big trips into the bush. The tiny supercomputers that live permanently in our front pockets are nothing short of a miracle when it comes to reading maps and terrain. I generally use a mix of Gaia, Trailforks, Google and recently Komoot for finding my way around whether on foot, bike or vehicle.

With a multi-day, self-navigated bike adventure in the Southern Alps on the horizon for early October, I took possession of a Coros Duro computer to test.

Coros Dura

Coros has been successfully making fitness and smartwatches for active people for a few years. Often competitively priced compared to the Garmin, Suunto and Apple alternatives, the hardware is robust and the software can extrapolate a world of data for curious minds and bodies. While this is the first bike-mounted computer the company has made, they promised me they had done their homework. If you want a full breakdown of every single feature and function of this unit, other reviewers have done that on Youtube. I will mostly focus on the day to day use case and navigation functionality of the unit. As my main fitness/sleep tracker is a Suunto Vertical, the Coros was primarily a navigation tool to see real time stats and mapping.

Main Features

The real reason the Coros Dura is an important piece of hardware is not the screen or the size or the industrial design. Coros engineers have managed to develop a computer that is so frugal when it comes to battery consumption that battery anxiety is no longer an issue. The 2.7" display is an always-on LCD with a strip of solar panel on the top edge and, given the right amount of sunlight, can not only slow down the discharge of the battery, it can also charge while being used to record an activity. Every hour under the sun can top up its battery life by 2 more hours. How is that for black magic? Without any solar interference, the internal battery can last up to 120 hours of activity recording. If you are the kind of person who doesn't like charging things or have access to power during a long trip, this alone would be a reason to pick one up.

I used the Dura on a trip to the Alps this October and after three weeks of continuous daily use, the battery life is still at 48%. Mic drop!

Physically, the Coros Dura is a 100-gram, 10cm x 6.5cm x 1.6cm device with a 2.7" touchscreen and Garmin compatible 1/4 mount system. You can also command the unit with the watch crown-like clicker wheel and a secondary "back" button. A fairly simple software interface allows for a decent two button operation and the scroll wheel has been quite functional after a couple of firmware updates. It wasn't all rosy for the Dura since the pre-release but the engineers keep pumping out updates on the regular making the usership easier each time. New functions are being added and the already powerful hardware spreads its wings ever wider.

However, the Dura won't win any design awards with its UI. It is simple, easy to read and the main screen covers most functionality without going deep into menus. The Dura will let you choose between Road, Indoor, Gravel, MTB, E-Bike, E-MTB to record an activity. While each activity is highly customizable, they by default have certain parameters highlighted and displayed. Dura can sync with Bosch and Shimano motors to display assist levels and battery life on the screen during an activity. While I didn't have this software update installed during my time with the Devinci E-Troy Lite, I am looking forward to using it when I get another eMTB to test.

The Coros Dura comes with a well-designed and sturdy upfront mount to clamp on 31.8mm and 25.4mm handlebars. This should cover most Road, gravel and MTB users but folks with 35mm bars will be forced to use a rubber strap 1/4 turn mount. This was not a deal breaker for me but an upfront mount that can handle all round handlebar sizes would be ideal. The mount for the Dura has a security bolt at the bottom which will allow for a somewhat secure anti-theft mounting to your bike. It's a small bolt so it wouldn't take too much to snap it off but it should stop opportunists nonetheless. Which brings me to one of the cooler functions of the Coros Dura: the bike alarm.

When activated through the settings menu, the device gives you the opportunity to set a 4 -digit code. Once the code is punched in, the countdown begins and the alarm is armed. Any movement to the bike and the computer sets off a rather loud (around 90dB) alarm. This can be deactivated by punching in your code. If you are within Bluetooth range, the alarm will deactivate as soon as you press a button on the app. Pretty freaking sweet.

Komoot and Navigation

Navigation is my main jam. I basically want a cellphone-like navigation and mapping experience from just about any device that claims to have a map system built in. So far, the Suunto's label-absent mapping and, initially, Dura's navigation function left a lot to be desired. But things changed with a few updates and the introduction of Komoot into the mix. 32GB of internal memory on the Dura is sufficient for plenty of offline map data to be downloaded. Within the Coros app, you choose the file you want to download and within a couple of minutes you have fairly accurate Openstreetmap files downloaded straight to your device. No further need for the phone during an activity for map use, unless a reroute is required. One complaint I mentioned to the Coros team a couple of times already is that you cannot use the mapping function unless the unit is in activity mode. In practice, this makes sense. I do wish that you could look at a map in some detail at camp in the wild and decide where you may want to go, or avoid. If you have your phone with you and the battery is not dead, you can use the mapping provided by the app, create a route there and send it directly to your device in an instant.

While mapping with fingers on a small screen can make it difficult to get accurate waypoints, the system works if you have the patience and take your time. If you want more streamlined route making, you can just drop a pin at the location you want to end up and let the Coros app route you there. On Seymour mountain, the app chooses the road to take you to the top. While efficient, it's not the most fun way to climb the mountain and explore a trail network. But the Shore is weird and this might work better in more open, grid-like trail networks.

For a week in October, Karin and I joined the Stoneking Rally Club Week that takes place in the Southern French and Italian Alps. This 6-day club ride consists of self-navigated, Komoot-supported daily rides through the Alps and the villages within. We were advised to download and join Komoot, a Trailforks-like app to download the regions and daily routes. Participants could choose between using their phones with voice-delivered turn-by-turn directions or using a computer to follow the tracks with their bikes. I was happy to learn that Coros and Komoot work well together and I could do this without pulling my phone out at every intersection (it still came out plenty of times for photos). It turns out Europeans have been using Komoot for a while, which is quite useful. For my Traiforks-trained brain, it took a while to figure out the language Komoot uses and find my way around the app.

Once I identified my planned tours for the week to my profile, I could save them for offline use. In the Coros app, Settings>3rd Party Apps>Komoot is where I synced the apps together. This allowed me to "pull" the Tours (routes for the day) from the Komoot app directly into the Coros App in the Device>My Routes> + section. Once pulled into the Coros app, I could then sync them into the Dura for turn-by-turn navigation during my rides. The process was simple once I figured out how to do it. Since there was no user manual showing me all the details of Coros app cross-compatibility and use, there were initial frustrating moments followed by a sigh of relief.

Real World Use

Once I downloaded the 28+ Komoot Tours to the Coros Dura, I started an MTB ride each time I wanted to use the correct one. On the activity page, I could click on Navigation, and choose the route I wanted to follow. Dura would then automatically pull up the map and show me the route I was about to follow. If I was further away from the start of said route, it would even help me get to the starting point by roughly routing me on the map. Brilliant. Things got really interesting from here on.

We were riding blind in the French and Italian Alps all day long on some excellent singletrack. The roads that connect these trails together were often double tracks not much wider than a Fiat 500. It was rather easy to take a wrong turn and end up in the wrong valley. We rode through people's backyards, under electric cow fencing and through ancient buildings multiple times a day. Luckily for us, we were given zero briefing on what to expect or landmarks to pay attention to. I will try to go into the details and the funnies of the trip in a separate article soon but without some digital help, route finding would have been near impossible.

The Dura did a tremendous job keeping a group of us on the track and trail during each segment. The 50m radius map (highest zoom setting) did an admirable job of portraying enough details to glance at while bombing down trails at breakneck speeds. As I passed forks on the trail to my left and right, I could quickly glance down at my bars to see if I was still on the blue line with my arrow. Only once did I blow a turn on a maze of a cow patch in the dense fog. After a few minutes of backtracking and side hilling, a couple of startled nuns with smiles appeared out of the dense fog and we knew all was right.

I Thought This Was Downhill Mountain Biking

While there was 20,000m of descending on the menu for the week, there was some climbing too. Some of it on pedal-friendly mountain passes, but also some of it on 38% incline hike-a-bike sections. Whatever was on the plate, Dura did a great job of displaying the trail and the elevation profile ahead. Along with the general elevation profile of the route being followed, Dura split the extended climbs into their own segments during navigation. Climb 1/3 , 2/3, 3/3 would have their own elevation profiles with the average and current grades indicated, as well as how much of the climb was completed and how far to the next one. As the difficulty of the climbs increased, the frequency of my checks on the climbing stats declined. I didn't always want to know how much suffering was ahead.

The Four Hundred Dollar Question

The Garmin Edge 840 Solar is direct competition for the Coros Dura. The Garmin costs 670 CAD and the Coros Dura costs 300 CAD. The Garmin can top up its charge at 25 minutes per hour of sunlight whereas the Coros can top up at 2 hours per hour of sun. That is a significantly more efficient solar charging system.

Garmin definitely has better topographic maps with labels to look at. If you are a map nerd, the Garmin wins this battle. The 2D Openstreetmap style mapping on the Dura looks basic and lacks labels. It worked really well in my case while following a pre-downloaded route but the Gamin would make it easier to pick your way through an unfamiliar trail network.

The 119 CAD arm-based heart-rate monitor from Coros is an excellent piece of hardware that I immediately incorporated into my routine. I have chest-based HR monitors and the comfortable arm-based Coros won me over in comfort and ability to charge instead of having to replace those damned CR2032 batteries.

I guess we can say that I am quite impressed with the hardware the Coros Dura rocks under that angular design and with every new software update, they have improved my experience with the device. I think they have a while to go until they reach Garmin or Hammerhead level user interface and experiences but what currently runs on the Dura is simple and powerful enough. If you are looking for a day-to-day computer that doesn't require frequent visits to the charging dock, or a multi-day trip companion with preloaded maps to guide you through the continental divide, put the Dura on your list. I have hosed the unit down with high-pressure water every single day for 2 weeks and the unit keeps on working without a glitch.

Alternatively, you can forget about all of this and enjoy your rides electronics-free for the rest of your times. That is fine too.

If you are in the market for a bike-mounted computer, the Coros Dura is one I would consider.

Coros Dura 400 CAD