Powder Review: COROS APEX 2 Pro
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In a Nutshell
The COROS Apex 2 Pro is a sleek, practical watch that’s a great compliment to backcountry or inbounds skiing.
Screen Size: 1.3”
Weight: 52 g
Stated Battery Life: 30 days of regular use/75 hours of full GPS
Water Resistance: 50 m
Satellite System: All-Satellite Dual-Frequency (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, Beidou, QZSS)
The COROS APEX 2 Pro is available now.
Intro
While many skiers wear sport or smart watches for everyday life, including their skiing, I came to the COROS APEX 2 Pro from the other end of the use spectrum. I didn’t feel an urgent need for a more full-featured watch in my day to day existence, away from the mountains, but I did find myself wanting a watch that could take over a few of the roles my phone had been serving during backcountry ski days—primarily GPS tracking, and navigation.
In pursuit of that goal I’ve experimented with several GPS watches of varying sizes and feature sets, and so far, the COROS APEX 2 Pro has the most useful combination of features, performance, and battery life that I’ve found so far.
Size and Band
The APEX 2 Pro is a little smaller and less bulky than COROS’s VERTIX line. That means it’ll work better for smaller wrists than the VERTIX, and doesn’t have such a chunky, in your face “yeah I do sports and play outside'' vibe as the Vertix. It’s much more sleek and classy.
The APEX 2 Pro comes by default with a soft, continuous band. Folks with bigger hands might struggle a little slipping their hands in and out of it, but it worked well for me. It’s really comfortable and dries quickly. If you want to hang your watch off a backpack strap, you’ll need a carabiner, or to buy a $30 silicon band from COROS.
Personally, I’ve found the APEX 2 Pro’s soft band to be warmer and more comfortable while skiing than a traditional silicon band.
The APEX 2’s controls are intuitive and easy to use, even when wearing light gloves.
Features
The COROS APEX 2 Pro is very feature-packed, and diving into every single feature would absolutely derail this piece. So let’s talk about the most relevant features for skiers.
One of the big selling points of the APEX 2 Pro is its ability to interact with all five types of major GPS satellites using a dual frequency system. COROS dives deep into what that actually means in this post, but the short version, relevant to skiers, is that a dual frequency system like the one in the APEX 2 Pro is more likely to be more accurate in terrain that’s traditionally challenging for satellite watches. That includes steep, heavily featured terrain, like couloirs and chutes, and heavily treed terrain like many of the approaches to fun backcountry ski zones.
In the past, when I tracked my skiing using an app on my phone, or another GPS watch, I’ve run into issues where the satellite tracking skips around, trying to determine your position while climbing or skiing a couloir. This leads to jerky, stacked, spaghetti-looking tracks that spit out inaccurate elevation and location data. In one particularly grievous instance, my phone recorded a track that was a half mile longer, and had an extra thousand feet of vert than the route I actually took. With the APEX 2 Pro, I’ve gotten consistently tidy and accurate GPS tracks, even in steep, heavily featured, or thickly wooded terrain.
The COROS phone app is one of the cleanest and easy to use I’ve found. It’s easy to build routes there, to navigate on the watch, build workouts, and export your data.
The APEX 2 Pro can connect to a GoPro or Insta360 action camera, and allows you to start and stop recording from your wrist. That’s a handy feature, and I found that it was even easier to connect to those cameras than some of their native accessories.
The APEX 2 Pro doesn’t have the capability for cardless payments, or offline playlist downloads from Spotify or Apple Music, like some other similar watches. You can however upload your own MP3s, along with maps and routes to the APEX 2 Pro for offline use.
Navigation
My biggest motivation for skiing with a sport watch is taking the weight of navigation off my phone. Love it or hate it, our phones have become a really important safety tool in the backcountry, but running GPS tracking from your phone, in the cold, is a great way to kill the battery. The APEX 2 Pro allows me to leave my phone in my pocket, keep it protected for emergencies, but still check my questionable navigation at a glance.
It’s easy to plot a GPS route of the rough route I plan to climb and ski, and upload it to the watch. Once it’s there, the watch will notify you with a buzz and a beep if you deviate too far from it, and the large screen makes it easy to keep tabs on your location. I’ve found it’s most helpful to keep an eye on the screen and where you are in relation to your planned route. It’s fine to deviate, but it’s nice to know where the standard skin track or ski line is in relation to your position so that you don’t end up wandering too far off track.
I’ve found that the APEX 2 Pro has changed how I navigate while skiing in a really positive way. The combination of the mapping function, and activity tracking alerts, means that I consistently have a better grasp on my location and progress, without having to constantly check my phone.
Activity Tracking
I’ve ended up taking a two-pronged approach to skiing with the APEX 2 Pro. The mapping feature gives me an idea of where I am and where I’m going, but the watch’s activity tracking helps me understand how much progress I’m making. The APEX 2 Pro has a wide variety of tracking modes for different sports, and each of these modes can be customized. I’ve experimented a little, but I’ve primarily used the Backcountry Ski mode, with it set to automatically sense my transitions between skiing and climbing. You can also set the watch to give you an alert at set intervals of vertical change or distance.
I’ve found that to be very useful. When I walk out the door, I usually have a general idea of how big of a day is ahead of me, and the total vert number I’ll probably rack up. In the past I’ve found myself doing mental math, subtracting my total elevation from the summit elevation, trying to figure out how much climbing I have left. But with the APEX 2, I have it set to buzz every five hundred feet of vert. That means I always have a better idea of how far I’ve come, and how far I have left to go.
The other activity tracking feature that’s very useful for skiing is the APEX 2’s strength training. COROS has a huge library of exercises that you can use to build your own workouts that the watch then guides you through. It’s easy to visualize and plan out an off-season workout that makes sense for your skiing style and goals, and then use the watch to keep you moving through it consistently.
Battery Life
The big differentiator for COROS watches is their battery life. COROS says the APEX 2 Pro should need to be charged about once a month, and can do full GPS tracking for up to 75 continuous hours. In practice, I haven’t recorded any gargantuan 75 hour efforts with the APEX 2 Pro, but I have appreciated how rarely I have to charge it. I really don’t like charging sport watches, I want to forget that I’m using one, not stress over the battery life.
In use, I’ve found that 30 day number to be pretty accurate, even while recording 10-20 hours of activities per week. I can get away with charging the APEX 2 about once a month, which I really appreciate.
If you’re shopping for a watch in this size and feature class, and you want to spend more time living, and less time worrying about your batteries, the APEX 2 Pro is an obvious choice. Its battery life is approximately twice as long as most competitors’.
Where does the COROS APEX 2 Pro shine?
I really appreciate how easy it is to forget that I’m wearing the APEX 2 until I need it. It’s comfortable, and unobtrusive. I vividly remember the moment that another smartwatch gave me a high heart rate notification when I got excited that the waiter at a restaurant had brought out my burrito. The APEX 2 brings none of that judgment. The COROS app and software does less to gamify exercise and sleep, and instead makes that data available if you want it, without pushing it on you.
That’s really nice for folks like me, who aren’t as focused on “training” but instead want a tool to track our time in the mountains. Sure, if you want to gamify your life, and obsess over steps and calories, the APEX 2 can do that, but it doesn’t force itself on you.
Where does the COROS APEX 2 Pro make some compromises?
The line between Sport and Smart watches seems to be blurring, as smartwatches get more sport-specific features, and some sport watches integrate options typically in the purview of more classic smart watches. The APEX 2 knows that it’s a sport watch though, and thus eschews features like Siri integration or cardless payments. I’m a big fan of that choice. I want my watch to act as a force to keep my phone in my pocket, not as something that brings the distractions of my phone to my wrist. But if you’re looking for those features, the APEX 2 Pro might not be the watch for you.
What sort of skier will most appreciate the COROS APEX 2 Pro?
A lot of backcountry skiers are still figuring out if and how they want to integrate a sports watch into their kit. And I’ve found that the APEX 2 Pro is a great tool for anyone who wants to farm out some of the navigation and tracking that their phone would traditionally do, to a different device. The APEX 2 Pro gives me a better grasp on where I am in the mountains, how close I am to my goals, and the route I’ll need to take, in an unobtrusive package. That, combined with its battery life makes it an easy choice.
