Coros Dura Solar GPS Bike Computer review

This Coros Dura bike computer combines great functionality at good value. It’s changed my attitude to bike computers.

Pros

• Excellent battery life
• Clear and customisable display
• User friendly app

Cons

• Solar charging function is limited
• Wheel control is difficult to use on the go
• Included mount is rather chunky

The Coros Dura has changed my whole attitude towards bike computers. No longer are they something I want to avoid using, or see no need for. This has actually added to my ride experience. If that’s not all you need to know to decide to buy this thing, then read on.

The Coros Dura is a bike computer that does all the things you’d expect a high end bike computer to do. It will tell you how far you’ve been, and how far you’ve climbed. You can attach it to an array of sensors and it will tell you how fast your legs are spinning, how hard your heart is pumping, and how powerful your legs are. It will help you navigate from A to B, or, thanks to the long battery life, A to Z and all the places in between. Except, it doesn’t have the price tag of many computers with this level of functionality.

Possibly helping the battery life – though I think it’s marginal – is the solar panel feature. To test it out, I left the computer (switched off) in the sun. Over the course of 4 hours in full sun, the charge increased 4%. Another hour and a half, it was up another 2%. All in all, I think you get about +1% battery for every hour in the sun. Not nothing, but not a lot. But then it doesn’t seem to use a lot – after two long days out using it to navigate, the charge had only dropped down to 84%.

All of that can be displayed – or not – on the screen in front of you. Using the phone app, you can pick and choose what the screen will display according to what you need. Plus, you can have different screen arrangements for different types of riding. Choose from road, indoor, gravel, mountain bike, e-bike, and e-mountain bike, and pick whether you want a nice big display of your heart rate, the map, your cadence… whatever. This is absolutely zero faff to set up, and the phone app generally is nice and easy to navigate.

You can also set up different bikes within each category, so if you’ve got three different gravel bikes and you want to see which one is doing the most mileage, you can add them all, and then assign each ride you do to that bike. Particularly useful on the mountain bike side of things if you like to keep track of service schedules for suspension and so on.

Uploading a gpx file is a doddle too. Just select the file wherever it is, and drop it into the routes in your app. I could do this from OS Maps using a simple ‘share’ to the Coros app – no lengthy downloading of files or trying to make space on your phone. The map screen is pretty good too, and allows you to zoom in and out.

If you want to do a route but you’re not quite on it, it can navigate you to the route, although I think this feature is a little clunky and had a tendency to keep trying to send you back to where it thought you should join the route, rather than figuring out you’d ridden in a different direction and perhaps there was now a better/faster option for joining the gpx trail. But, not bad, and once you get fairly close to the route you can see your location and the planned route on the screen. Once you meet the route, it gives a spirit-lifting and celebratory fanfare of a chirp.

It also chirps cheerily at you when you finish a climb on a planned route. Both these chirps are actually quite nice and manage to be quite welcome. But there are other bleeps too – to alert you to rerouting, or leaving a course, or starting/ending a ride. You can also set it to bleep at you to remind you to fuel your ride – quite handy for those prone to bonking. I found some of the bleeps less welcome and rather loud, and while you can limit them, I couldn’t quite get to a setting that I wanted. A volume control would be very welcome – the current option of choosing on or off didn’t quite satisfy my desires. Another thing that would be useful would be to have some kind of ‘detour’ setting, where it wouldn’t keep madly bleeping at you when you leave a planned route to take in a cafe stop or look at an interesting rock.

For all that the bleeps are quite loud, the alarm is pretty quiet. More of a ‘someone’s stopwatch is going off’ type noise than an alarm. But still, it’s a nice addition to be able to set it to start bleeping if it the bike does get moved, and it seems reasonably sensitive to movement.

The only other mild gripe I have is the control wheel. It’s a bit too sensitive, it would be nice if it was more indexed. It’s fairly easy to knock when riding along, and it’s hard to turn to the precise screen view that you want while on the move. But it’s a minor gripe.

It would be nice if the included mount was a little less chunky, as it limits where you can fit it, although I will grant that it’s very secure. And since it’s the same mounting fixture as Garmin uses, it’s very easy to get an alternative to mount on the precise part of your bike that you desire.

I’ve really appreciated the lack of spinning connection waits that I often associate with technology. The Coros Dura seems to find its location quickly and easily – and I’ve tested it in the UK and rural USA. It also connects to my Polar H10 Heart Rate Monitor with no hesitation.

The Coros Dura has reliably uploaded to the app at the ends of rides, and I like the way it automatically names your ride based on location and ride type – of course, you can give them your own names too. It has reliably connected to my phone to do updates and download gpx files. The app itself has a nice mix of displays and is easy to navigate. It rather makes me wish I had a Coros watch to go with it so I’d have all my activity data in one place, rather than just my bike rides from the Dura. I find myself wondering what my HRV might be, and what it would all have to say about my recovery time. Everything else I’ve seen in the app feels more intuitive than in others I’ve used, it makes me sort of curious.

I’m not really a data gatherer – or one for structured training – but the ease of use has meant I’ve not got annoyed with the Dura. This has meant I’ve actually experimented with the features and found different screens for different uses. Displaying my heart rate is handy if I’m trying to keep up a certain effort – I know where my sustainable level is thanks to some indoor training (which the Dura is happy to help monitor – it just turns off the mapping). Knowing you can keep pushing without blowing up is actually quite useful, it turns out.

I’ve also liked the hill tracking feature. If you’re following a GPX route, it calculates how many climbs there are, and gives you a celebratory chirp as you tick them off. You can also follow where you are on a climb, with a colour coded gradient showing what’s ahead. That’s actually really useful for pacing, especially when you’re on unfamiliar territory and there are false summits.

There have been regular software updates during my time using it, which is reassuring in that it suggests development is happening and user interfaces being updated. That said, it hasn’t been one of those annoying ‘you can’t use it until you update now’ type situations every time I try and leave the house.

Overall

I’m impressed. The Coros Dura is easy to use, has excellent battery life, and isn’t annoying. Plus, it’s a chunk cheaper than many and doesn’t need any subscription services or paid for add ons to make it more useful. If you’re bike computer curious, or just looking for a good value navigation option, I’d recommend this.