Walking Equipment and Accessories

Coros Vertix Icebreaker Watch | Review

If you live for getting into the mountains, you need a watch that does more than tell the time

Why We Chose The Coros Vertix Icebreaker: very outdoors focussed, durable, impressive battery

Despite having a name that sounds a bit like the main villain in Avengers: Infinity War / Avengers: Endgame (Thanos), Coros are actually a performance sports technology company that pride themselves on helping athletes to reach their full potential. Their high-grade hardware, loaded with innovative tech, is designed with outdoor enthusiasts, mountain lovers, and all-round active lifestyle folk very much in mind.

Who Is The Coros Vertix Icebreaker Watch For?

As the Coros website spells out in big, bold, font, the Vertix watch is all about “attitude” and “altitude.” The semi-rhyming marketing slogan might seem a bit ‘on the nose’ but dig a little into what this timekeeper has to offer, and it quickly becomes clear that the Vertix not only talks the talk but walks the walk as well. In a nutshell, the Coros Vertix is a watch for adventurous souls who like to get high in the mountains (vertically speaking, not the recreational drug thing).

Materials/Build

With its titanium bezel and cover, with high-grade fibre watch body, and sapphire glass with diamond-like coating the Vertix Icebreaker is more than tough enough to handle itself in the world’s most extreme places. The watch’s band is made from silicone but you can actually swap this with other options, even those designed for the Fenix 6 Pro by Garmin. It has a touch screen though you’ll find most of your interface navigation will be done using its side buttons, including one twizzle one that makes for fast menu scrolling (this can actually be used while wearing climbing gloves). Fortunately it’s designed so that it can be set up for right and left handers.

The resolution is 240 x 240 pixels and uses 64 different colours. There’s a screen backlight, with the light activated at the press of a button or when you lift up your wrist. It’s not the brightest or most vibrant of screens we’ve seen but it’s certainly still visible on sunny days.

Battery Life

The last thing you want when you’re on a big mountain expedition is a watch that hasn’t got the ‘juice’ to go the distance. Fortunately this stacks up very well in regards to battery life: 45 days of regular use without using all the bells and whistles, 60 hours in full GPS mode, and 150 hours in UltraMax GPS mode. One of the longer lasting options out there then – so a definite crowd pleaser for any long-distance hikers out there, we reckon.

Track, record, and analyse your outdoor pursuits and training with 18 different activity modes. Photo: Mike Brindley

Wrist-based heart rate monitoring. Photo: Mike Brindley

The design of the watch face is customisable. Photo: Mike Brindley

Features

In the same way that mountain people want a watch that can go long periods of time without a recharge, they also want a watch that can deal with wet and miserable weather. There’s no worries with the Vertix Icebreaker, on that front, as it has an impressive 150-meter waterproof rating.

In the materials section above, we’ve already touched upon the durability of this watch. What might surprise you about this though, especially when you consider how tough it is, is just how lightweight it is. Weighing just 76g, this watch certainly doesn’t feel as cumbersome as some of the GPS options out there.

It’s operated via a touch screen, two buttons and a scroller. Photo: Mike Brindley

One of the things we like most about this is the 24/7 blood oxygen monitoring with altitude acclimatisation assistance. That’s all worked out via a wrist-based pulse oximeter and heart rate monitor. It’s an excellent feature, unique to this watch, that mountaineers will really benefit from.

There’s a sense that this watch knows its place in the world, and fundamentally ‘gets’ where the user is going to use it. This idea is underlined, and then underlined multiple times thereafter, by the built-in barometer, altimeter, compass and GPS / GLONASS satellite connection feature. It’s easy to go wrong in our planet’s high places so the fact that COROS have gone to great lengths to make sure you never go too far astray should, again, comfort the mountaineers in our audience.

To follow a route you’ll need to download it as a GPX file onto your smartphone off another app like Strava or komoot. You then need to open it with the Coros app on your phone and you can then view it on the watch once you’ve paired your two devices together. On the watch, that route will be presented as a basic breadcrumb trail which you can zoom in and out using the buttons or swing side to side using the touchscreen. Your tracks are presented in white and the route you’re following is in red.

“This brings a lot to the party for committed outdoor enthusiasts.”

You can view your completed routes and workouts in the Coros app afterwards. There’s also the potential to pair the Coros app to another route sharing platform, such as Strava so you can upload your results there.

There are 18 different activity modes across this, ranging from hiking, cycling, running and swimming to strength training and a bunch of other fitness focussed stuff. All of these have pre-set workouts but you can also create your own ones and follow ones that other people have created as well.

Conclusion

With its RRP of £599.99, the Coros Vertix Icebreaker isn’t the cheapest watch in the world. But then, as we’ve already explored in detail above, this brings a lot to the party for committed outdoor enthusiasts, especially in regards to its battery life. If you’re serious about the mountains, and getting into serious situations, you need something serious on your wrist, this, we’d say, would be one of the better options out there for you.