GPS Devices Item ID: #693Garmin Edge 705 GPS-enabled Cycle Trainer
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Item DescriptionItem Reviews5 Responses to “Garmin Edge 705 GPS-enabled Cycle Trainer” |
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The Edge705 is by far the most comprehensive GPS bike computer around. It has lots of data fields, works with Ant+ gadgets like HRMs and cadence monitors, is quite lightweight, water resistant, and has good battery life – it will cope with even the longest sportives. In other words, the specs are great, and it has proved useful in letting me know when I’ve strayed off course.
But the truth is that the owner experience isn’t so great.
The software is terrible, particularly the desktop-based Garmin Training Centre (the web-based Garmin Connect is better to use in general, but you can’t sync GPS routes through it and in any case my Edge won’t talk to it). The user interface is awfully old fashioned, resulting in me making minimal use of the features, especially when riding. It is very easy to end up with no navigation or no ride data. The unit doesn’t seem to want to pair with my HRM and cadence monitor, so on race days it picks up everybody else’s gadgets too and gets confused.
The first unit I had didn’t sync with the PC at all and had to go back, and Garmin (who’ve been excellent in the past) let themselves down a bit with their customer service. Just to put this in context – I’m neither technophobe nor technosnob. I’m one of those people who fixes other people’s PCs and gadgets for them, but I’m easily delighted and I want to enjoy new toys, not be a cynic.
So it’s OK. But Garmin is a big company now, and these gadgets are top-price. There’s really no excuse for a second-rate or just-about OK experience. I love cycling and I love gadgets so I really wanted to love this, but I don’t.
I bought one of these recently and I have to say its probably the best cycle computer you can get. I,ve had an Edge 205 for a couple of years and was impressed with it until I got the 705.
However, like other reviewers of this product the base map it comes with is completely useless and you will need to invest in additional mapping, which can cost a fare bit. I bought City Navigator from Garmin on a Micro SD card and with this add on you get the full benefit of the device.
So be warned the 705 is good but its only brilliant if you buy the additional maps for it.
The hardware itself is fine, but the quality of the provided maps is poor (unless you’re just cycling on main roads). The software is abysmal and appears to have been designed to cause irritation and frustration. I write software for a living so this isn’t a review by someone who gets confused by how to use Word. I’ve seldom seen anything this counter-intuitive.
After installing the free OpenStreetMap maps and working out which utilities I needed to pass data through in order to get a decent route out of the end, I would award this 3 or even 4 out of 5. If you’re not willing to put a lot of time into fiddling with it, I would not recommend this. I get the feeling I’m using a beta product that may make it to market in 2-3 years.
Don’t buy this if you’re expecting to get a TomTom style device for your bicycle.
I quickly found with this unit that the acompanying documentation is totally inadequate. Having tried many times (in all different configurations) the Heart rate monitor only works for about 10% of the time, somehow telling me my BPM is 39 going up a 1.3km 12% gradient is suspicious to say the least. It is almost impossible to change your destination whilst out, unless it’s an address or post code. Impossible to set a destination as a map reference or OS ref. It’s a bike gps right? so why does it always set my route on major roads motor ways?. It really goes nuts when I deviate and just sits there with “recalculating route” message for mile after mile after mile or keeps prompting me to u-turn. THe map zooms out to an impossible scale at will. I really would like this device to be useful but so far it’s only use is to tell me accurately where I am at any time and roughly which direction I am heading.
Summary
An expensive bicycle computer and training aid, with limited satnav and off-road navigation capabilities. Think carefully before buying this. When compared with a cheap bike computer you are paying a premium for the ability to collect and record speed and position as well as altitude, heartrate and cadence information (the latter at extra cost!). Compared to a typical satnav you have a sunlight-readable screen, long battery life, and a simple bike mount.
The unit is small and only 110g without mount. It seems fairly robust, but it’s only a matter of time before the flap covering the USB port breaks off.
Display
Small but easily read in sunlight: the brighter the light the better it is. The backlight is needed only for shade or dark conditions; and turns off after a while but can be turned on again by tapping the stick or pressing a button. The light also turns on when giving directions so navigating at night is theoretically possible. Although in a recent night ride it would sometimes beep without turning on the back light (I didn’t work out what it was indicating).
The colour choices could be better as the route line doesn’t always stand out from some roads.
Training
Excellent. The ability to record every aspect of your route and then display it as a map, table and graph is very entertaining. More useful is the ability to compete against a past version of yourself much like the ghost car in a car racing game. I’m not a great athlete, but even I have been encouraged to push that little bit harder.
Mapping
Poor. On my first ride with the city navigator maps I was asked to drive down a one way street and make an illegal turn. My Tomtom had both of these correct. The Open Street Map mapping is patchy, but more useful for cycling as it includes most trails and paths that a cyclist rather than a car will be using. And whilst with both Tomtom and OSM you can easily update the maps; I don’t know how to do this with Garmin. It is now possible to get routable OSM maps, which are painless to install. However when routing in cycle mode it often acts strangely, taking you off and back on to a straight road for no particular reason. It performs better when set to car mode, but then you lose the ability to easily select off-road navigation.
The OSM maps can fit in the internal memory, or be put onto a standard micro SD card.
Routing and Guidance
Often useless. The unit is very reluctant to realise you have strayed for its route (which is unavoidable due to the poor mapping). It will continue to imagine you are on route even when you are two or three streets away. Consequently, when it enters a zoomed-in display during a turn you may find that your position is actually off the screen. The guidance for a turn is typically a little after the turn and it is possible to miss a turning even at bicycle speed. There is a countdown, but this is not that helpful in the dense side-streets of London as it counts to zero after the turn. This is also a criticism of other Garmin satnavs, whereas Tomtom seem to alert you in good time.
If the device does finally realise you are well off-course the recalculation of the route takes too long to be useful. By the time it finishes you may be off that route as well. During the recalculation the unit locks: you can’t turn on the backlight or start or stop the timer, which is very annoying.
Software
There is no Agent similar to that of the 405. Uploading tracks is a manual process, which you have to do twice if you use Garmin Connect as well as Garmin Training Center. Both these packages need improvement, but are reasonably serviceable. The biggest pity is that GTC doesn’t allow you to see the summary data (pace, speed, etc) as an on screen table at the same time as the map.
Reliability
During one long ride the internal memory of my unit became corrupt. GTC reported not being able to load the workouts from the device, but the record of my trip was silently lost. Luckily I had the resources to repair the filesystem, but not recover the data. Garmin need to make available a utility to reformat and reinstall the whole device in case of failure.