New garmin product 1040edge, 840, 540

[jlok]

You're talking about Xplova X5 Evo.

[usr]

Also, can I turn off the virtual partner for once? Not that it's a deal breaker but it's almost like a "bug" becoming a feature for a laugh.

That one's really kind of depressing... virtual partner might have been a cool feature back in the days of the 800, but now it's really just something that makes me consider riding without the beep on navigation promts (which is really the only occasion I want my GPS to do anything audible, but I want that beep so much I cancelled my original Karoo preorder for the lack of speaker)

[usr]

I think that we are at a point, with bike computers, like with smartphones. No big innovations anymore but improvements.

At least they are occasionally passing on improvements from the much bigger watch market to the comparatively tiny cycling niche. Almost 50% more runtime, presumably from the exact same battery. That's huge!

I just don't understand why Wahoo and Garmin aren't using better screens (price?) and like some people say.

Battery. You don't want a screen that is only legible when it outshines the sun during an all-day ride. Watches with more "fancy" screens get away with it by powering down the screen unless explicitly triggered (gesture or touch), by requiring slightly less brightness because the user can change the screen angle when it's bad, and by simply having much smaller screen surfaces (power demand for outshining the sun is proportional to screen size). The Karoo 2 days through a considerably larger battery for much shorter runtime and that's only in part because of the far more heavyweight software stack (wahoo are half way in between on the software side)

[BikeTyson]

I just don't understand why Wahoo and Garmin aren't using better screens (price?)

I'd take the Garmin screen over the Karoo 2 any day. The battery drain is part of it but the Karoo 2 is unreadable because of glare in half of my riding. Check out the GP Lama video for a comparison. I had the same issue. It doesn't matter what the screen looks like inside or on cloudy days, if I can't read my head unit for the majority of my ride because of the sun, it's a hard no for me. Garmin screen all day.

[pdlpsher1]

On my Garmin I have issues reading the screen when the sun is on my back, with my back casting a shadow on the Garmin. The screen becomes too dark and unreadable. I have the screen auto brightness set to auto. Do you guys experience the same issue that I do?


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[usr]

Not really, but sunny sky, sunny surrounding, but device in shadow is certainly one of the most difficult situations for the auto brightness.

Where I occasionally consider my 1030+ screen a little hard to read is close to dusk, on a map screen with lots of hillshading darkening (riding on a south-eastern slope).

What Garmin could easily do, as a massive improvement imho, is setting different backlight curves for different screens: give the map a little more brightness. Old-time users are expecting map to be a battery guzzler anyways (currently that's not really true thanks to the better chips).


What would also be nice,because currently people unhappy with the auto brightness curve are forced to run some fixed brightness which is a total waste at night where even the lowest setting is generous: offering some configurability for the auto brightness, because everybody seems to have a different sweet spot (e.g. people who run their map without hill shading might be happy with a much lower setting). The old edge 1000 had poweruser-configurable brightness curve hidden in some file that was part binary serialization, part tab-separated text, I tweaked it to get considerably more runtime. (you can get by with super low backlight in the dead of night, even if you might want to go blazing through the battery in daylight).

[Yoln]

I wouldn't totally agree in terms of "no innovation" anymore.

Climber-pro for example is pretty recent and has just spread out to (being copied by) Wahoo/Hammerhead less than a year ago... and that's a game changer for me, probably the functionality I use the most.

I'm sure there is much more to come, especially in terms of adaptative pacing, helping people to target the fastest section given a NP target for example, the way some 3rd party apps (myWindsock for example) do it, but integrated in the device and adapting live

[pdlpsher1]

Climber-pro for example is pretty recent and has just spread out to (being copied by) Wahoo/Hammerhead less than a year ago... and that's a game changer for me, probably the functionality I use the most.

I agree but too bad it only works when you're following a pre-determined route. You think Garmin would change that on the 1040, but sadly no (at least there's no mentioning of it in their leaked material).

[Butcher]

Isn't there one manufacture with a 'climbing app' that does not use a programmed course?

It would be difficult to program since the app would have no clue if you are going to turn off/change course on the climb.

[Mocs123]

Climber-pro for example is pretty recent and has just spread out to (being copied by) Wahoo/Hammerhead less than a year ago... and that's a game changer for me, probably the functionality I use the most.

I agree but too bad it only works when you're following a pre-determined route. You think Garmin would change that on the 1040, but sadly no (at least there's no mentioning of it in their leaked material).

Climb-Pro also works when you have a segment saved as a favorite in Strava. I have all the major climbs around me marked as favorites and I never load pre-determined routes.

[jzhaojieh]

Isn't there one manufacture with a 'climbing app' that does not use a programmed course?

The Karoo 2 detects climbs without a course or starred strava segments

[jayjay]

Any info about a possible switch to USB-C?

Very happy with my Edge 830, but a bigger screen + USB-C would be very welcome

[Aesch]

if no USB-C would be a dealbreaker for me. im still on edge 1000 (replaced battery once and screen is now slowly dying but has performed really well for me) but i wont be buying any more non-usb-C appliances.

[Tonytony]

When my navigation is on, I sometimes get a wrong pop-up when I need to make a turn. Most of the time it's a random turn somewhere else in the route. Someone has the same problem?
This is the only problem I've got with my edge 530, apart from that it's really good. Long battery life (20h with navigation), fast enough,...

[usr]

Isn't there one manufacture with a 'climbing app' that does not use a programmed course?

It would be difficult to program since the app would have no clue if you are going to turn off/change course on the climb.

Hammerhead has one-upped Garmin in this.

The logics is easy when you have a routable map with altitude, just do a tree-walk search that stops when it went downhill again, a much simpler algorithm than actual routing. Then select the highest point touched, preferring a route that doesn't change road category a lot when you have multiple contenteders. Make the stop condition "downhill more than x% of the climb so far" to get to the top of climbs with an intermediate dive like Timmelsjoch northern side. Also ignore contenders that changed to a lower category road a few % before the end/top (e.g. you wouldn't want the Stelvio to be presented as going all the way to Restaurante Tibet)

Challenging are two parts: how often do you check? Think of battery use and the like. The pre-planned only approach of Garmin is super easy of course, but it allows them to do the "climb starting in x" thing which I guess is part of the appeal (I have to guess because I tried climbpro and didn't see any value for me at all). And how good is your elevation data? Basic DEM grids are quite bad in alpine surroundings and maps that are just sourced from OSM famously don't contain road elevation. Garmin again takes the easiest possible approach, they just display whatever elevation is provided by the route. E.g. if your route is from Komoot, climbpro will display those "komoot stairs" (Komoot does some weird quantization in their gpx exports)