The outdoor recreation sphere is on the rise, particularly among those who can buy smartwatches, as more participants are earning incomes over $100,000 annually, based on data from the Outdoor Industry Association. Among these activities, hiking stands out as the most favored.

Backpackers, particularly those obsessed with minimizing weight, are keenly enthusiastic about their gear. Discussions about equipment were quite frequent amongst hikers during my time on the Appalachian Trail earlier this year. This is echoed across backpacking forums. An effective gadget requires minimal advertising—word of mouth convinced me to try the Haribo Mini Power Bank, known for being the lightest and perhaps the cutest 20,000mAh battery available. There’s potential to undercut Garmin smartwatch prices too, as their premium options can exceed a thousand dollars. The Garmin Instinct 3, for instance, is priced at $399 at the cheapest but lacks map download functionalities like the Nomad. My lapse of owning a Garmin watch for a decade stems from not finding them justifiable for their price.

In my month-long preparation and during my trek, I utilized the Coros Nomad, priced at $349. Although I will enumerate certain limitations specific to my intense outdoor activities, it’s important to acknowledge the watch’s value for its price. However, the design feels more aligned with casual adventurers or distance runners in suburban settings.

The potential exists for a product that fulfills all of Nomad’s promises, but Nomad itself falls short. This represents a misstep in marketing yet raises the question: why aren’t hikers and trail runners expecting more from such devices? Even those catered to outdoor enthusiasts seem primarily designed for road running.

Let’s address it upfront: the battery life is outstanding, especially when compared to my Apple Watch Series 6. Unlike some of our review team members, I tend to use gadgets to the point of complete failure. The official length of the Tahoe Rim Trail is 165 miles, though the FarOut navigation map indicated 174 miles. I followed an itinerary planned for 11 days. After fully charging the Coros Nomad at the start, I wore it continuously throughout the trek. It depleted its battery toward the end of day 6, after covering 19 of the planned 25 miles, with over 40 hours of active tracking. Once recharged, it lasted for the remaining part of the hike without needing another charge, which is impressive.

But my first clue that the Nomad hadn’t really been designed for me happened as soon as I opened the Coros app. The defaults on that app give you a sense of who it’s for, and the third section down, after the “Today” data and the training calendar, is a prompt for creating a personalized marathon plan. Coros’ displays are admirably customizable, so removing the marathon plan section was easy, but I had nothing comparable to replace it with. In fact, while the watch has a lot of features for road and track runners, they don’t tend to generalize to people who hike, backpack, or even do trail running — a major missed opportunity.

The app had a prompt for a running fitness test, but it only works in “run” or “track run” mode, suggesting it’s not really geared toward trail runners. Road and track running are primarily about pace. Trail running generally involves dodging obstacles, dealing with uneven or loose ground, and longer, steeper climbs. That makes pace less of a priority, partly because of the increases in agility, balance, and strength demands. My guess, based on the fact that trail running, as a specific activity, is excluded from running fitness tests, is that Coros knows the “fitness test” won’t be accurate for trail runners. That’s frustrating in an “outdoors” watch — it means the outdoorsiest runners aren’t getting the same kinds of training insights as their road runner brethren.

Likewise, while there is an “auto pause” feature available for runners, it doesn’t work for hiking and walking — which is weird. My Apple Watch doesn’t have a problem noticing when I’m not moving. (There is a “resume later” mode if you want to track multiday activities in one track; I didn’t use it because breaking my hike into segments by day made more sense to me.)

I also found myself frustrated by the training calendar. While I could enter my strength routine and my trail runs, I couldn’t add hikes. The upside of the training calendar was that I could summon a specific workout on the Nomad as I did it — so if I was doing an interval run, the watch would notify me when each interval was over. For road and track runners, there are even preloaded workouts you can add, rather than painstakingly programming your own. Sadly, there wasn’t anything comparable for trail runners.

The watch did well at tracking walks and runs, of course. Both the distance and the altimeter seemed accurate when I tested them against my Apple Watch — I got roughly the same readings. But the default watch display on hiking was five screens of data. On the first page, it gave distance and speed, with the amount of time spent doing the hike in a bar near the bottom. The second page contained my heart rate and the time of day. The third page was Coros metrics — training load, as well as how efficient it felt my aerobic and anaerobic training was. The fourth page was lap (which in this case just meant mile) time, how far I’d gone until the next mile, and my speed. The final screen was the grade, my elevation gain and loss.

This is nonsense. I am simply not going to scroll though that many screens on a hike. That Coros’ made-up metrics take precedence over elevation and speed seems like a crucial error of judgment.

On any given day I’m on trail, I need to know roughly what my overall per-mile pace is, what my current pace is, how many miles I’ve traveled, and when the sun is going to go down. (It’s nice but not necessary to know my overall elevation gain — when combined with information from mapping apps, it can tell me how close I am to being done with climbing for the day without me pulling out my phone.) So I consolidated the screens of data to two useful ones. But the tradeoff for easily changeable widgets is that the watch isn’t designed to be readable at a glance. Maybe it’s just my middle-aged eyes, but the combination of the display and the relatively small fonts meant I was squinting at the watch more often than I should have been — especially given that it was taking up so much real estate on my wrist. A less modular display might have created room for more readable design.

But perhaps the most damning thing about the Nomad and the Coros app is how much they rely on being connected to the internet. The biggest failure is that the Nomad marketing copy advertises safety alerts that allow the watch owner to send an SOS — but without cellular data, they don’t work. If the watch can’t contact a satellite on its own, it’s no good in the wilderness as an SOS device. (Most watches can’t connect directly to satellites, though some new models will.) My problem here is the marketing: if you are promising that the watch is for going anywhere, the safety alert feature you’re advertising had better go anywhere, too.

In the Sierras, there are often afternoon thunderstorms, and while I was on the Tahoe Rim Trail, I had five straight days of them. (On the first one, I even got hailed on.) I had a 25-mile day not because I meant to walk 25 miles, but because I’d gotten most of the way up to the highest point on the trail, Relay Peak, when a thunderstorm began. I looked around at trees near me that had obviously been struck by lightning at some point in the past, decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and began heading back down.

I’d gotten most of the way down when the thunderstorm passed, and then I had a decision to make: was I going to try to get over the mountain again? This wasn’t really a decision the Nomad could help me with. My Garmin InReach Mini 2 had helpfully informed me that there was, indeed, another thunderstorm on the way — it will work as long as it has a view of the sky, though a weather report will cost you one of your expensive text messages. The Nomad, on the other hand, pulls most of its data from Apple’s Weatherkit API, which means it only works if your mobile phone has service, so if you’ve put your phone in airplane mode to conserve battery or you don’t have service at all, you’re out of luck. So if you’re trying to stay safe by planning for the weather, the Nomad doesn’t really cut it in the backcountry.

I did make it up and over Relay Peak before the next storm began, a deluge that soaked me to the skin despite my rain gear. But I had plenty of time on the down slope to wonder, soggily, if it would have been helpful to have gotten a storm alert before the first thunderstorm started. I found out after I got back to civilization that it was, in fact, possible to get a storm alert — the Nomad has a built-in barometer. Unfortunately, it was buried in a menu I hadn’t explored, and the storm alert defaulted to off.

I don’t expect Coros to entirely retool its app to prioritize backpackers. But it might have been helpful to get some of these details in a one-sheet with the Nomad quick-start guide: how to turn on weather alerts, how to test for altitude acclimation, that the SOS service and weather require cellular data. I know that a lot of people enjoy fooling around with every menu and setting on their gadgets, but personally, I’d rather hike. Pointing me at what might be useful would help me with that goal.

If the company wanted to invest more in training plans for trail runners, hikers, and backpackers — or, at minimum, allow people to add planned hikes to their workout calendar — that would be great. But there are other ways the Nomad fails the outdoors athlete.

As I was getting ready for the trail, I brought the watch to all my workouts, which is unusual. Generally I reserve activity tracking for cardio activity, because watches are pretty good at tracking that, and pretty bad at most everything else. But with its training load metrics, its recovery timer, and its sleep focus, the Coros app suggests the company’s devices can be used to foresee a person’s needs doing fairly complicated activities.

Unfortunately, these activities are pretty idiosyncratic.

The Coros app is somewhat successful at estimating training load for cardio, but the limitations around how it handles other activities make the “insights” suspect. The training load is based on duration and heart rate — which means for non-cardio activities, it’ll skew low. This data is then used to set a recovery timer, which is supposed to tell you how long it’ll take before you’re back at 100 percent. Because the training load isn’t based on reliable data for non-cardio activities, the recovery timer isn’t trustworthy either.

These problems aren’t unique to the Nomad; the Apple Watch (and pretty much every wearable fitness tracker) sucks at tracking this stuff, too. But it doesn’t try to give me recovery metrics or in-depth training insights.

Like most sports watches, the Nomad wasn’t very good at handling my strength training or yoga. The bouldering settings struck me as more useful. The watch will cue you to handle your first problem; when you’re finished, you click one of its buttons, and can then enter how you tackled the climb, using the sport’s specialized jargon. Afterward, you can see your total ascent, how long you rested between problems, and the grade you climbed at — as well as some less useful data, like heart rate. But with all three sports, the watch had trouble telling how much I’d exerted myself.

On trail, the Coros recovery timer wasn’t much better. After the first day, according to the watch, I was fatigued and needed to rest. The recovery timer stayed there throughout the duration of the trip. There were days I woke up feeling fresh and ready to go, and then glanced at the Coros app, which told me I was at 0 percent of my capacity. That felt silly, especially when I’d then knock out 15 miles.

And despite all the workout modes the Nomad offered, there was an important one missing: rucking, or walking with weight. That’s the key feature of backpacking. The Apple Watch doesn’t offer rucking, either. Whoop also has a rucking mode, but doesn’t track weight. Coros’ direct competitor Garmin introduced a rucking mode earlier this year, allowing users to track their pack weight, and while its features leave some things to be desired, it’s a start.

It’s weird that rucking is so thoroughly ignored. Bro influencers, from Andrew Huberman to Peter Attia, have been singing its praises; GQ named it “the workout of 2024.” Axios notes it’s on the rise among women, too; Women’s Health highlighted its beneficial effects on bone density. Even Tom’s Guide has called it a “game changer.” Look, I consider myself a backpacker rather than a rucker, but whatever you call it, this is an underserved market.

The promised personalized training programs Coros’ app offers simply don’t fit anything I’m doing. To train for a thru-hike, I typically do trail runs and rucks using my actual backpack. On most workdays, I’m not going to be able to get in even a 10-mile hike, so running is important for my cardio capacity. As for rucking, that’s partly to get my feet used to the demands of the extra weight. The goal is to ruck with either my maximum pack weight or more for the month before my hike.

I will spare you the details of hiker math, but here’s the bare outline: I knew my gear alone would be 16.2 pounds; that I’d need to carry about 5 liters, or about 10 pounds, of water at maximum; and that water carry would be when I was also carrying four days’ worth of food, or about 8 pounds. My pack, at its absolute heaviest, would weigh about 32 pounds.

That meant when I did training hikes, I loaded up my backpack until it weighed 35 pounds. Those hikes were largely vibe-based — I usually climbed a minimum of 2,000 feet over 10 miles as quickly as I could. But while I was training, I had plenty of time to fantasize about how a backpacker-oriented fitness watch could make my life easier. Here’s what I came up with:

Sure, there are a limited number of thru-hikers who are going to be doing this particular style of training — but it will also benefit the much larger number of people who ruck for fitness. And who knows? If a smartwatch came up with a good couch-to-thru-hike app, it might catch on just like couch-to-5K.

On both the Nomad and the Apple Watch, I tracked my hikes as “walks” and my hikes with weight as “hikes.” That helped me separate the activities at a glance. But there were still some annoyances. On the Apple Watch, both my hikes and walks counted toward my estimated VO2 max, which is an indicator of aerobic fitness that is particularly important to endurance athletes — and while the actual value is kind of a bullshit metric that will vary pretty wildly between watches, the trend line is what I’m watching. When I’m hiking with weight in preparation for a backpacking trip or on the trip itself, my VO2 max takes a hit. When I stop hiking with weight after the trip, my VO2 max shoots up. Garmin gets around this problem by disabling the VO2 max when its watches are in rucking mode.

The Nomad’s VO2 max is buried in the “Running Fitness” menu, a feature I didn’t click on for a very long time because, well, it turns out there’s no data available for me since I’m not a road or track runner. Neither walks nor hikes count toward that score — and neither do trail runs.

I understand the Nomad added offline street names to its GPS navigating capabilities, which was basically meaningless to me — there aren’t a lot of streets where I go. The watch’s screen wasn’t big enough to be my main source of navigation; FarOut is pretty tough to beat, not least because it can do things like tell you if a water source is still running even if you don’t have service. It’s also difficult to get lost on the Tahoe Rim Trail, which is well groomed and clearly signed. Perhaps if I had made camp and gone for a day hike, it would have been more useful in retracing my steps back to camp. Still, I didn’t see any obvious flaws using it, and I was impressed by the lack of lag.

The map the Nomad generates can be used as the backbone of its Adventure Journal function. This is the distinguishing feature of the Nomad, which lets you add photos and voice notes made on the Nomad watch — it’s got a built-in microphone — to your recorded activity.

Sadly, it, too, does not work unless you are connected to the internet. This limits its on-trail usefulness.

For ultralight types, keeping notes in your phone is good enough. I carry a notebook and pen — luxury items, but fairly flexible ones. I keep a trail journal on the days I don’t immediately fall asleep as soon as I lie down in my tent. (It’s a nice way to wind down.) I also use it to sketch out my intended route, make shopping lists for my resupply runs, and, in a pinch, leave a note on the dashboard of my car saying when I expect to be back from my trip. For the kind of hiker who doesn’t want to bring a pen (0.3oz) and notebook (5.4oz), it might serve as an upgrade over trying to type on a phone.

Writing in my journal is a habit; making voice notes is not. So while I was hiking the TRT, I did not use the microphone, because it simply did not occur to me. To be honest, I’m not sure what notes I’d make on a thru-hike that need to be coordinated to a specific point on trail. The voice notes feature is probably most useful for people who hunt and fish, or birdwatchers. Like many other Coros features, it’s not exactly easy to find the voice note function from the activity screen — but once I located it, it worked well enough.

The photo feature was more intuitive. You can take photos in the Coros app, though I didn’t; I find it easier to take photos without unlocking my phone. Because I went so long without an internet connection, I was dreading dealing with the backlog, but uploading the images to my activities was fairly effortless — and when I sent some of my travelogue to my friend Rusty, he didn’t have any trouble seeing both my route and my photos.

The real question around the Adventure Journal was how much it locks your notes into the Coros system, and the answer is: at least a little. I was able to export the data from my last day, and then upload a GPX of the hike to CalTopo, one of my favorite mapping programs. Though the data included my pins — the spots where I’d taken pictures — the pictures themselves were not included.

I agree with a lot of straightforward hardware reviews about the Coros Nomad — the battery life is fantastic, the watch itself is relatively light and can take a beating, the offline navigation works very well (for a watch — screen limitations are always going to matter), and it’s appealingly cheap. It’s a tremendous upgrade over my current watch in those respects. While a flashlight or solar charging would be nice, they’re not necessities. No, it’s the software I have beef with.

As far as I know, there hasn’t yet been a truly great backpacker watch, and the Nomad definitely isn’t it. The Adventure Journal is a neat toy, but not much more. The software fixes that could get the Nomad over the line might include training programs for trail runners and backpackers, a rucking mode (ideally with better support for rucking than the relatively paltry offerings by its competitors), and a more considered recovery program. Even simpler fixes — highlighting the capabilities that the Nomad does have but are buried in a non-intuitive menu, an easier-to-read design in activity modes, an app that does more when it’s offline — would be improvements.

But let’s dream for a minute, because the Nomad really got me thinking about what an ideal outdoor watch could do. Obviously, the battery life and GPS navigation are nonnegotiable. But the one hardware modification that could really change the game is satellite connectivity. I know it’s possible to connect to a satellite via a watch because the Apple Watch Ultra 3 offers it — but that watch only has an estimated 72 hours of battery life in low-power mode, and it’s $800. The new Garmin Fenix 8 Pro also offers it along with roughly 27 days of battery life, but it requires a subscription on top of its absurd starting price of $1,200.

A watch that lets me drop the Garmin InReach Mini (3.5oz) has benefits beyond the weight savings and letting me cancel an expensive subscription: I am less likely to lose my watch in a fall than I am to lose the Garmin device, even if it’s clipped to my belt loop. A watch that lets users send a real SOS — as well as check-in notifications — is going to be much more of a game changer than solar charging, flashlights, music, or wallets. Add alerts for severe weather, and you’ve got a winner. That’s safety gear, and no one in their right mind skimps on that in the backcountry. People are going to buy Garmin’s Fenix 8 Pro, despite the eye-watering price and subscription, for exactly this reason. Shit, I might be one of them when I need to replace my InReach — even though the Fenix 8 Pro is stuffed with features I don’t want or need, like speakers, a voice assistant, preloaded golf course maps, and dive functionality. I’d love a better, cheaper alternative.

When I am on a solo hike, people are consistently surprised that I — I’m openly female — feel safe enough to hike alone. Thru-hiking is pretty male-dominated, and a lot of effort goes into assuring women that we are fairly safe outdoors. I wonder how many other women might try their first solo hike if they knew they could easily summon help by pressing a button on their watch. Probably a lot! And I bet there are a lot of women road runners out there, especially in rural areas, who would benefit from knowing they can summon help without cell service too.

This is maybe a prime example of how designing gear for the most intense users also expands the market. That’s the norm for this sport. Ray Jardine pretty much revolutionized backpacking by cutting weight and kicked off the ultralight movement. Ultralight gear made the sport more accessible to women, older people, and people with injuries, increasing backpacking’s popularity. Thinking about thru-hikers and trail runners — especially ones who are training for the more maniacal races, such as 100Ks — is like making basketball shoes for LeBron James. Ideal gear will matter more to LeBron, but the average high school player stands to benefit too.

So: is the Nomad a good watch? Yes, in some ways, if you’re comparing it to current offerings from Apple or Garmin — especially in its price range. But it doesn’t live up to its marketing campaign of letting you go anywhere and do anything. The reasonably affordable watch that will do that for the world’s most deranged gearheads doesn’t exist. At least, not yet.