Coros Dura Solar GPS Bike Computer

The Coros Dura Solar GPS Bike Computer is likeably easy to use, with navigation that works really well, even away from the streets on gravel tracks. The solar cells do almost nothing for charging, but restrict the screen size, and the battery life seems way lower than claimed. Despite this, and a host of smaller niggles among its many, many functions, it's a solid device that's generally useful, effective and pleasurable to use.

For more options, check out our guide to the best cycling computers.

> Buy now: Coros Dura Solar GPS Bike Computer for £249 from Coros

For a device that offers almost overwhelming complexity – like most GPS computers, it will record, measure, estimate, average and number-wrangle almost any parameter you can think of – the Dura is mercifully easy to use. Say for some reason you just want to go for a ride, see how far and how fast you went, and then save it at the end – you won't need to read the manual.

Install the Coros app on your phone and you can plot a route, send it (along with 29 others) to the Dura and then follow it during your ride – again, all without needing the sort of systems training an F16 pilot gets just to figure out what any of it means.

Of course, you can get the Dura to display vast amounts of data if you're determined, including separately sensored information such as heart rate, power and cadence, alongside multiple interpretations of time, distance, elevation, speed and training load. You can have up to nine frames of numbers per screen, and there are four pages to scroll through. I generally stuck with six measurements on one page, and left it on page one. I found that perfectly legible so long as the infrequently-needed info went in the smallest boxes; many layouts are nicely designed to emphasise some things over others. You're entirely free to choose what goes where.

Changing the basic settings is easy via the unit itself, as the touchscreen works well and is augmented by a large wheel that clicks in as a second button (there's a regular button below it), but functions such as map-making are wisely reserved for the app.

Generating your own routes is pleasingly simple, as you just tap somewhere along the route and the app snaps the line to the road (or track) up to that point. If there's no road, you can select Manual to set a waypoint, and the route will simply straightline to it.

It'll always choose the shortest route between two points, and while it's not hard to coax it onto the desired alternative if that's not where you're going, this could really do with an 'undo' button to just delete your last input. Instead you have to select Erase and then draw along the section you want gone with your finger; it works well in itself, but pressing undo would be simpler. Overall though, route-making is impressively easy and quick. Alternatively, you can just send it routes downloaded from the likes of Strava and Komoot.

The results are also easy to follow, with big clear symbols popping up over Google's colour mapping and loud beeps alerting you to turns with 300ft countdowns. I found them too loud in the quiet of a forest, but they're piercing enough to cut through when you're surrounded by cars – shame there's no volume control, though.

Navigating on sprawling, jumbled fireroads where every track and every junction looks the same is far trickier than on a road network, and the Dura handled it very well, staying very clear (and accurate with your position) even when faced with multiple turnings next to each other.

One direction

If you do stray off the route, it will reroute you... maybe. It needs to be connected to your phone, which needs to be connected to the network, in order to work anything out. In the absence of a connection it first just tries to make you turn around (having taken a good 100 metres to notice), before switching to showing a straight line across the landscape to the route.

In isolation, the Dura can only figure out a 'new' route when you're already on a road that intersects with it, and it's the shortest distance to it anyway. This is unimpressive – if we've got to use our phones and have coverage, then why do we need a unit like this as well? At least the alarm beeps (eventually) let you know you've gone wrong, I suppose, so you can turn around.

> How to plan the perfect cycle route and follow it on your bike computer

When you hit a climb it also beeps and displays an ascent profile generated, presumably, from that Google mapping. It's really not very accurate though; during the test it made quite gentle climbs look like mountains, ignored severe ones until I was halfway up, and separated one climb into two despite a complete lack of level ground anywhere. The profile is also broken up into coloured slices (presumably according to gradient), but there are always so many of them it's better at looking pretty than providing useful information.

This unit starts up very quickly ('off' is sleep mode rather than actually off), and finds satellites pretty rapidly too. There's clearly some algorithmic trickery going on in its dual-frequency GPS chipset as the speed readout is impressively smooth (more basic units jump around a lot on stuttery climbs), and it shows less sign of losing signal than some others on the bits of my test routes where I know it's poor. It makes for a nice stable readout.

Connections with phones and gadgets are stable and easily made too, as this supports both Bluetooth and ANT+, and can handle up to 12 sensors at once if you're partly bionic. The Coros heart rate monitor I tried with it gave entirely believable results, though with a quite significant lag.

One million options

Allow access to your contacts and you can 'enjoy' message notifications and auto-send safety alerts, while it also runs group tracking, gear info for electronic groupsets, and will sound an alarm if your bike starts moving unexpectedly while parked. In combination with the app it further supports training plans, structured workouts and will even perform an FTP test. Basically it does everything bar post inflammatory lies about why your ride hasn't gone well to social media, but then that's what firmware updates are for.

The screen is crisp and clear, though I found the default brightness a little dim; there's a single brighter setting available that's very good. The readout is not as large as you might think, however – in fact, it uses less than half the area of glass here, for reasons I'll get to in a second.

Battery life is also good, if not as good as it should be. Coros claims 120 hours, but after five hours with the screen on its brighter setting (and a couple of hours with navigation), the battery had gone from 60% to 50%. Now my maths is terrible, but five hours per 10 per cent of charge implies a 50-hour battery life to me. Not bad, but (checks fingers) less than 120.

You've forgotten about the solar recharging, you might be wailing, to which I might make a very Italian gesture that does not mean 'hard', as Dura does, but something else entirely. Because during those same five hours, the solar panels charged the battery by 0.8%. Okay, UK summer seems to have been deleted this year and it was extremely cloudy, but there's been some sun (during these five hours and the rest of the test), and nothing suggests these figures would suddenly leap to meaningful levels.

As the battery life is very usable anyway, I find the solar panels annoying for a different reason: their position in the top of the face is, presumably, why the screen is so much smaller than the glass. Again by my maths, it fills roughly 39% of the total glass top.

For quite some time I found myself glancing down, only to have to glance down a little further because the screen is pushed so far down the unit. It's not a huge problem as it (especially on its brightest setting) is extremely clear, but it's still a shame it's not bigger. Some pretty affordable watches such as G-Shocks regularly feature solar panels lying invisibly across the face itself, so it wouldn't technically be impossible to have both a bigger screen and larger solar panels at the same time. I'd like to see that here, though presumably it wouldn't do anything good to the price.

The other negatives are really only niggles too, such as the out-front mount (plastic but secure and stable) not sitting quite square to the bars, the touchscreen just occasionally not being active so you have to use the button for selection instead, and not being able to mix imperial and metric units. There's also the excessive questioning for the profile section; it wants everything from your phone number to your gender assigned at birth.

Value

The £250 asking price seems reasonable given this unit's abilities, and it's slightly lower than something like the Giant Dash L200 GPS cycling computer at £289.99, though that's discontinued, and didn't do incredibly well in our review, with downsides including poor battery life and slightly unreliable performance.

If it's just navigation you want, the Beeline Velo 2 Cycling Computer is far simpler than most and costs just £99.99 (up £20 since our review in 2022), and our reviewer found it very easy to use. It can't connect to any sensors, unsurprisingly, and it too relies on an app and your phone for most of the hard work.

One significant problem for the Coros is the Garmin Edge Explore 2, which is also £249.99 and scored an impressive eight out of ten when we tested it. Despite being a few years old now, it's well proven and still a very solid option from what's arguably the dominant company in this space.

Overall

The Dura is a decent GPS that is, for the most part, very easy to use. It's capable of recording and displaying a vast amount of data, and very legibly too, but it's certainly not without its flaws – both on the hardware side with its limited solar charging and screen size, and the software side with its various niggles.

If you're not too serious about going all the way down the data rabbit hole, though, it's a light, reliable and weatherproof display for telling you where you're going, where you should go next, and how hard you're working while going there.

> Buy now: Coros Dura Solar GPS Bike Computer for £249 from Coros

Verdict

Easy to use, effective and stuffed with features, though not all of them are really worth having