Although I completed a half marathon last year, I would only describe myself as a casual runner. My number of runs per week fluctuates as much as my enthusiasm for dragging myself out of bed to pound the streets of my quiet town. I never regret going on a run, but I have not caught the running bug in my thirties as much as some people on my social media feeds seem to have done.

As a tech reviewer, I have been lucky enough to test several running watches over the years, using them to measure my steady 5-10km plods around various loops. These devices can get incredibly expensive, so although I’m thrilled to review them, I often hesitate to recommend them to others as they seem like overkill.

The current darling of the running watch review mob is the Garmin Forerunner 970, a high-end choice from the popular brand’s range. It’s a good looking and accomplished watch, but £629.99 is an incredibly steep ask if all you need is a reliable sports watch.

All you really need is accurate GPS tracking, solid battery life, and a display that is easy to read while running. When these three things gel, I’ve always enjoyed whatever watch was strapped to my wrist.

The latest I’ve tried is the Coros Pace 4, a watch so good and at such a competitive price that I struggle to see why I would recommend anything pricier unless you’re on the trail every day or about to throw yourself out of a helicopter and into a 100 mile ultramarathon.

Coros, a Chinese firm based in the US, was founded in 2014 and released its first GPS watch in 2018. Since then its products have gone from strength to strength, and the Pace line of running watches has stood out for its value for money.

For £229, the Pace 4 is all I, and probably you, need in a running watch. I prefer a lightweight device, and this one weighs just 40g with its silicone band attached (a nylon band version makes it 32g). Compared to older models, this one has a vibrant OLED display, replacing memory-in-pixel (MIP) tech. OLED, the same tech on most smartphone screens, drains more battery, but Coros has done some wizardry here to get the Pace 4 to last for days.

I love Coros’s charging method too. There is a proprietary connector on the back of the watch, with a tiny USB-C adapter in the box that tucks into a rubbered keychain. You slip it out and plug it all together to charge. As my phone charges via USB-C and the watch only needs a top up every week or two, carrying this little accessory on my keys is much preferable to another charger in my bag.

With the always-on screen disabled, the watch lasted for more than two weeks on a charge, even with frequent GPS run tracking. With the AOD on, as I prefer so you can see the time without flicking the screen towards you, it lasted more than a week. During runs I can glance down and easily see up to four key metrics at any once time, which you can customise in the app.

The touchscreen is nice and responsive, but there is also a digital dial to scroll through menus if you’re wearing gloves. It’s also a button, which lets you lock or unlock the screen at any time to avoid accidental presses.

Pressing another button when on a run toggles between stats and a breadcrumb-style map, but this watch does not have full mapping. It’s quite hard to follow a breadcrumb trail – a thin purple line on a blank black screen – with no actual map. It’s a big downside to the Pace 4 and a reason to steer clear if you want maps on your wrist for big days out on the trail.

I found the GPS very accurate and quick to latch onto a signal, unlike cheaper alternatives such as the £179 Fitbit Versa 4, which always struggles. Heart rate accuracy is solid, on par with comparative data when I compard it to Garmin and the Apple Watch Ultra 2. Data is presented in the excellent Coros app for iPhone or Android, an app I prefer to the very cluttered Garmin alternative.

It’s smart enough to create personalised training plans after you’ve you;ve worn the watch long enough for it to track your average week’s exercise. With battery this good and a watch this light, you can also wear it to bed and it’ll track your sleep. You can only download MP3 files to the watch if you want wireless music on the go without your phone though, as it doesn’t support music streaming apps or offline playback. It actually also lacks music controls from audio playing on your phone, which is a miss, as is the lack of contactless payments.

What is fun is a new voice pin feature that when in a workout lets you record a voice memo at the push of a button. This is then pinned to where you were on the GPS-tracked route when you made it, making it handy for waypoint notes, remembering the details of a run trail or anything you want. It’s a handy idea, and well implemented in the app. Your ntoes are even transcribed for you.

I easily connected the Coros app to Strava to auto upload activities and there are many excellent watch faces to choose from. In all, the Coros Pace 4 is an accomplished running watch (that can also track several other sports) that is refreshingly accessible to anyone at any level. For everything you’re getting and considering the alternatives, £229 is a fair price.

One alternative is the £199 Suunto Run, an equally versatile and relatively simple sports watch aimed at, obviously, runners. I tested it with a fabric strap, finding a similarly lightweight build and an easy-to-use interface. It has 34 sports modes, solid GPS performance and up to 12 days of battery life, which I found accurate.

Just like the Coros, this watch at the cheaper end of the scale is perfect for casual runners clocking a couple of jogs per week but could equally serve as a marathon training device.

If you want to dive deeper into analytics, get more features and have more premium hardware on your wrist, I recommend the Garmin Forerunner 570. At £459.99 it’s too expensive for what it offers in the mid-range of run watch prices. Garmin’s watch and app software is very mature and takes a while to find everything, but for data-heads it’s the best choice.

For the extra money you get the ability to upload Spotify music to the watch for online playback to wireless headphones, something the Coros and Suunto lack, plus offline voice assistant features and the ability to take calls from your wrist if you need. The OLED display is very bright and of excellent quality.

But it lacks offline maps, something I hoped to see for the price, and although Garmin offers excellent tools such as recovery and training readiness metrics, for a runner like me it all feels like overkill. When I run for fun, being given a daily score and pushed to hit the track is simply not my vibe.

That’s why the Coros Pace 4 fits the bill for me. It is as simple or as complex a watch as you want it to be, in a lightweight body with accurate GPS. Sometimes, simpler is better.

You can buy the Coros Pace 4 for £229 from Amazon UK