Coros Dura head unit

Not sure about a digital crown :thinking:

2 Likes

Battery life looks amazing but the navigation looks to be severely lacking, at least at the moment.

Edit: apparently it isn’t even that amazing. I read another review where they claimed otherwise.

1 Like

Glad Ray didn’t write it off immediately, hopefully they’ll see it through to where it’s workable.

I don’t mind the extra bulk if it means not having to worry about keeping yet-another-device charged. 120 hours would be almost once a year for me (sadly).

1 Like

@GPLama didn’t hold back on his video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhCuyAIkN0w

3 Likes

It’s been interesting to see which reviewers bring up the problems and which don’t even mention them at all. DCR and GPL bringing it up right away notably.

4 Likes

@operatingthetan666 Very. The contrast is amazing.

2 Likes

Great point, a good litmus test for reviewers who are full of sh!t…

Personally nothing here that I find compelling vs. Wahoo or Garmin (the former being my preference.) The total market for whom 100+ hour battery life is a gamechanger has to be pretty tiny; randonneurs and bikepack-racer types I guess?

2 Likes

I do like the idea of it being able to charge faster in the sun than what the battery drains. Be pretty cool to be able to just leave the computer on the bike and not take off to charge. Garmin hasn’t gotten to that point yet so perhaps this will push Garmin to innovate on this front.

Definitely sounds like it is not ready for prime time…zero interest in this unit right now.

2 Likes

Not at all. I switched to Wahoo from a cheap and ugly Lezyne (I love Lezyne for many good things, but their usability is stuck in the 1950s, and they did nothing about it for years). But one thing I was spoiled was battery life. I always knew that even if I forgot to check my battery status before the ride - it would still last me until the end of the day, no matter how long I was going to be out there. Unless, of course, I forget multiple times in a row, but my memory isn’t that bad yet. But with Wahoo… it’s a constant pain in the ass. I’d love to think less about that.

If I were in the market for a bike computer - I’d probably buy Coros. For three reasons:

  1. Battery life (even if it’s not exactly as good as they claim - it’s still great).
  2. Just like DCR I’m confident they’ll get there eventually with all the updates.
  3. I just like trying new and non-mainstream stuff :slight_smile:

But obviously, nothing to even think about while my Bolt is still kicking.

Video review of a “normal” rider I enjoy following. Also has some sweet van build videos.

It’s surprising to see so many people putting faith in their promised updates fixing a lot of the issues. I have no experience with Coros as a company or with with their watches. I just don’t understand how the next update (or two) will fix everything they’ve been working on for two years that still isn’t ready. Sure, some of the issues I’ve uncovered might be edge case… but it screwing with power data when they’re touting it as ‘performance focused’? 120hrs of shitty power data and dodgy navigation prompts (or no prompts at all if you’re sycing routes from Strava)?

The spectrum of reviews I’m seeing is like nothing else I can remember. After freezing my balls off at 10:30pm on a Sunday night riding my bike up and down the street wondering why the f’k Live Track doesn’t work, to listening people say “Yeah, this has Live Tracking” and that’s all… has me questioning what actually passes a ‘review’ these days. Narrator: Live Track doesn’t currently work. Get back inside.

22 Likes

I don’t understand the decision to send it to media in its current state (I don’t know how that process works tho). Maybe they expect something from the media that I don’t see or know.

They’re entering a market with established brands and devices. They need to punch above their weight in order to gain a spot here. However, they currently aren’t offering anything that you couldn’t find in the other devices at a similar price. Maybe they deliver what they promised but consumers can also wait until they get there. There’s little to no point in taking the risk right now.

I’m excited to see what happens but until then this device is not even an option.

4 Likes

I think they expected the media to promote their device, not actually review it.

7 Likes

So they wanted you just to read the promised spec sheet? An ad for free

1 Like

That is it in a nutshell for me….if they can’t get the basics right now (seriously….navigation arrows pointing in the wrong direction?), why should I trust a future update?

Nope…hard freaking pass for me, even more so after actually watching Ray and Llama’s videos.

1 Like

Yeah I’m not sold that they will have a good product within the next 6-9 months or so. I also think that releasing it in that state is a big mistake. As long as the routing doesn’t work properly with Routes not created in their app they shouldn’t even think about releasing it, same goes for Power data from ANT+. And according to DCRainmakers observations the Battery life right now is no where near the claimed one.

The device would be interesting for Bikepacking and ultraendurance stuff if the Battery life gets to a point where it is close to the claimed one, but for that the Map needs to be usable and rerouting should probably work on the device, because that are the scenarios where you are in areas without cell reception…

I’m also not sol on the digital crown thing when riding offroad.

Thanks, @gplama for being my morning entertainment. That was on par with the equally scathing review of one of SRM’s recent power meters …

My understanding is that Coros makes very good sports watches, and it is surprising that they introduce a dud. Just the huge forehead makes it seem quite ungainly, and the Digital Crown doesn’t make sense to me in the context of a bike computer. What a pity, I was hoping for credible competitor to Garmin, Wahoo and Hammerhead.

2 Likes

Have they ever watched your or Ray’s videos? :person_facepalming:

I would assume that @dcrainmaker has had a lot of contact with them in the past as he has been reviewing their sports watches. Coros should have known better.

Another viable option would have been to nail the core functionality and then bank on their good reputation in the watch space. Before they fix routing, they should fix the sticky watts issue. If they promise insane battery life, they should deliver that — underpromise and overdeliver.

I think Hammerhead went down that route where they kept on releasing regular updates until it became something customers could count on.

1 Like

I think COROS believed they’d have the majority of issues fixed before the 17th. Or even, weeks ago. But I get the impression their developers have underestimated just how complex the cycle-specific realm is. It’s one thing to have “functional” bike features on a watch (many companies do this just fine), but another to have bike-focused features on a bike computer.

A significant portion of the reason the ship-date launch got pushed, was myself and a few other reviewers pushing back that this was hard-not-ready for shipment (or proper review). Most of the reviewers that received the COROS unit were either watch people that happened to have relationships with COROS in the past, or, a smattering of non-tech reviewers in the cycling realm, that might not have had much review experience in bike GPS. And that’s fine, having new opinions of devices is always welcome. But COROS does have a long history of leaning very hard on their sponsored athletes, and ambassadors for content, often without declaring any relationships there. It’s a large part of why the ‘reviews’ (or whatever they are) this time are so varied.

As I said in my post/video, knowing COROS, I have lots of confidence that COROS will fix the bug-type issues by fall-ish. But offline routing is incredibly complex/hard, and will take years.

The battery bits remain to be seen. Most reviewers out there looked at the summary battery page, which is, as COROS themselves said, simply incorrect right now (you have to look at start/end times) It’s a random number generator. So, we’ll have to see the battery down the road. However, historically COROS has had crazy-long battery life, somewhat heavily through trimming other features. We recently saw them reduce the official battery specs of some of their watches to account for having to add in things like more accurate HR data. If we look at the bike computer side, we see some of those shortcuts already in the current firmware (e.g. not recording left/right power, weird power recording atop that, multi-minute delays on missed turns, not showing turn notifications if not on map page, etc…). How those impact battery life, once added, will be notable.

12 Likes