New adventure smartwatch beats the Apple Watch Ultra on battery and price

The most expensive smartwatches are often geared towards outdoor pursuits, earning the ‘adventure watch’ moniker. They’re able to track a plethora of specialist sporting activities such as diving or mountaineering, provide advanced mapping and waypoint tools, and are more rugged and durable than cheaper wearables.

One of the most popular picks for such smartwatches is the £799 Apple Watch Ultra 2. It offers premium design with an OLED screen, tons of apps, seamless connectivity with your iPhone and can even be used for scuba diving at up to 40 metres.

But the Ultra 2’s Achilles’ heel is its battery life. Even though it’s the best on any Apple Watch, it’s limited to two days at a push before it’s crying out for a charger

That’s why watches like the new Coros Nomad exist, offering those in love with the great outdoors a capable alternative product that is, in this instance, less than half the price of Apple’s extreme device, coming in at £319.

Coros is a US-based wearable company that has quickly made a name for itself in the past few years by producing well-priced smartwatches that have proven competitive with Garmin, Suunto and Polar, three brands that have had a stranglehold on the outdoor smartwatch market for some time.

The Nomad is Coros’s attempt at a mid-range adventure watch to compete with Apple but also similarly designed devices such as the Garmin Instinct 3. The Nomad uses what’s known as a memory in pixel (MIP) display instead of a power-hungry OLED, but it’s still able to display in colour. Coros says the Nomad can go up to 22 days in standard use, and up to 50 in All-Systems GPS mode.

Notably for the price, the Nomad has dual frequency GPS and global mapping including offline access, a feature that ranges from handy to lifesaving depending on the user and situation, and is a prime reason to save a wedge over an Apple Watch Ultra, a wearable that can only access maps with a data connection.

The Nomad allows for all the on-wrist mapping tools you’d expect such as saving locations and waypoints, while you can use Coros’s new Adventure Journal feature to record voice notes or upload videos and photos while tracking a route, with the app pinning that media to the map of your route so you can review it later, or indeed find those places again in future.

In another differentiator from rivals, the Nomad boasts eight dedicated fishing modes, letting you log catches and species, as well as monitor things such as tide times and air pressure.

“We built Nomad to help adventurers have a new way to capture memories and experiences, without compromising the high-performance hardware Coros users expect,” said Lewis Wu, Coros CEO and Co-Founder. “It’s made for those days you have in the outdoors that stick with you long after the trail ends. It can't replace being outdoors, but it can help you remember what it felt like to be there."

The watch comes in the outdoorsy green, brown or dark grey colours and is made from aluminium and polymer to keep it lightweight.