COROS’s charging adapter is a neat solution to the smartwatch charging cable problem
Smartwatch charging is a mess, with a different proprietary cable for every brand. Lose your watch cable on a trip, and you’re waiting a week for an expensive replacement or hoping a knock-off Amazon cable works. However, the fitness watch brand COROS has found a unique solution to the dilemma of charging cable for watches.
When COROS launched its PACE Pro watch, it replaced its usual three-pin cable with a tiny USB-C dongle; you insert a USB-C cable into it, then plug the dongle’s pins into your watch. This way, you don’t need to keep a phone and watch charging cable on hand — just slide the dongle onto your phone cable every couple of weeks when the battery dies.
That “A2” dongle was PACE Pro-exclusive, but this new “USB-C to COROS A1 Charging Adapter” works with the recent PACE 3 and 2, APEX 2 and 2 Pro, and VERTIX 2S and 2. I also assume future COROS watches will match the A1 adapter, making it the universal option.
This is still a “proprietary” charging solution, so you’re screwed if you lose this tiny adapter; from experience, it’s very easy for people to assume it’s trash and toss it. Thankfully, COROS bundled it with a key ring holder so you can latch it onto a backpack and never lose track of it.
I’d love to see other fitness watch brands emulate COROS’s approach. Garmin, Polar, Amazfit, Suunto, Fitbit, and other fitness watch brands each have unique connectors, so they’d each need their own adapters. But I’d still prefer a tiny, distinct adapter so that I can keep another (more useful) USB-C cable plugged into my charging brick at all times.
I suspect that we’ll eventually see more watches adopt the Qi2 wireless charging instead, which would arguably be an even better “universal” charging option. But COROS piggybacking on the USB-C standard is the next best thing.
Why smartwatch charging is such a mess
A couple of years back, I asked Jitesh Ubrani, IDC’s research manager of worldwide device trackers, why smartwatch charging is such an unsolvable mess and whether the EU should step in for a universal standard, just as they forced Apple to drop Lightning for USB-C.
He explained that “wearables come in far too many shapes and sizes” for a universal standard to make sense.
If every watch had to use a Qi charging coil, for example, it would “stifle innovation” and “do more harm than good,” particularly to smaller brands that design their watches to prioritize other perks like larger batteries.
Ubrani said that wireless charging would become “more ubiquitous in the coming years as costs come down and power consumption amongst smartwatches is reduced.” But fitness watch brands stick with the status quo because slower charging isn’t a big deal when your watch lasts 1–3 weeks.
So, until that distant future when wireless charging makes sense to fitness brands, COROS’s adapter is the next best thing.
Should Qi2 become the universal smartwatch standard?
At the moment, Apple and Galaxy Watches use magnetized wireless charging cables, and leaked Pixel Watch 4 renders suggest that Google will ditch its current pin-charging system for wireless charging. However, they don’t follow a particular standard, such as Qi2 wireless charging, so they’re not interchangeable.
Switching between Android and iOS isn’t particularly common, but it would be nice if all the mainline Android watches and Apple Watches used interchangeable Qi2 chargers.
Qi2 supports fast wireless charging and a strong magnetized fit, making it less likely that your watch fails to charge because you didn’t seat it properly. Plus, if you switch brands, your old charging cable doesn’t suddenly become useless e-waste. Instead, it could charge other Qi-compliant devices.
Because these watches all use similar processors and hardware, I doubt it would be particularly onerous for any one brand to use an industry-standard charging coil. And because they only last a couple of days per charge, prioritizing faster charging is more important for these watches, anyway.
As long as using Qi2 wouldn’t prevent watches like the OnePlus Watch 3 from hitting faster charging speeds, I don’t see any downside to a more consistent universal watch standard. But since most brands would prefer the flexibility of their own unique charging solutions, I doubt will see this happen anytime soon.
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