Longer ride experience

Wanted to share the experience on a longer ride of 110 km. Before I start I must tell you I like the Karoo 2 and the fact I know my device gets improved bi-weekly.

For the ride, I created a route on the dashboard and it is great to see it immediately syncs to my device. On the K2 using the ‘newest’ filter it is immediatly available on top. Searching through the list of available rides is quick and easy. My Garmin never gave me such smooth experience.

Live tracking

I wanted to share my track, so I turned on live tracking. At first I tried to use the hotspot from my iPhone. This didn’t do the trick. Somehow the K2 got disconnected during the ride, so I have to try another time.

Since I have setup the K2 to have a cellular connection, I switched to that option. Looking at the cellular dat I have now used around 3.05MB after the ride and leaving the cellular connection on for the remainder of the day. Interestingly I found under the cellular data>data usage menu, you can setup a lot of things, First you can see usage per day, usage per app, and when mobile dat is turned on, you get settings like ‘data warnings’ and ‘data limits’. 

The live tracking requires the ones you share your link to, to setup an account. I would prefer this would be optional, as it makes the experience for them less smooth, and when they click on menu items in the dashboard, they have to reopen the tracking, by finding the link again. My preference would be a single page they can store as favorite to track me, or have a button in the dashboard, where they can jump to the tracking.

Phone

Notifcations from my iPhone work perfectly, although I have noticed the connection is not always stable. In addition, I would love to see a more extensive phone integration, allowing me to get weather data on my device, and a smoother live tracking experience. 

Sensors

During the ride I use a couple of sensors in addition to the gps; Garmin speed, 4iii power and cadence, Wahoo Tickr heartrate. I noticed a couple of times the 4iii is not picked up automatically. The power sensor needs a number of rotations to wakeup and somehow when I start the ride before the spindown my power is not recording. Turning off and on sensors after I have pedalled a bit makes the power meter gets recognized. I would like to see that this would be resolved as I don’t want to go and check my sensors before I go for a ride.

Map and Routing

I love the screen and the map on K2. The fact you can look at the map in 3D and that the map display is smooth and fast during the ride, make it wonderful. Some locations even show 3D buildings for orientation. One request is to have the profile remember my last used zoom and view setting for maps.

Routes are available instantly, which is very pleasing. No endless calculations before you can start to ride. My garmin required many minutes to calculate some longer rides.

The Turn by Turn navigation clues however caused me headaches. Very often I got false positives, like getting notifcations to turn left or right within 80m, while on a straight segment. Another issue is that some actual turns only showed very late, making me to miss my turn. I live in the Netherlands with a very dense road/cycle path network, and it would definitely help to get situational views on TBT clues. I ended up zooming the map to a level I could see the situation more clearly, and paid less attention on the TBT. I would love to see improvements on TBT accuracy.

Rerouting, when I didn’t follow the route or missed a turn, was very quick. I really appreciate it. My garmin more often than not would take a very long time to recalculate or even fail at it.

Battery

So far I have only been riding up tp 60km. That always was fine, but this time with cellular data on, I got down to less than 20% around 15km before ending the ride. This meant I had to turn on battery saving to ensure my ride was captured. This is way less than expected, as my ridetime in total was only 3:40 hrs. I really hope the battery life gets improved.

Battery saving in itself works good, turning off the screen, when on a straight segment. Yet as noted on the TBT issues, there are still false positive or occasional late turn clues. I was able to record and save my full ride, but like said before this is way less than expected. I expect a 8hr battery life from a modern device.

As I am planning to do longer rides, I am looking for optiins to charge the device in ride. One issue seems that the device is very close to the handle bar, so I hope to find an angled usb-c. Better would be for future customers that Hammerhead would provide that as part of the package. 

Mounting

I use the Karoo 2 mounting system. I love how solid and slim this is. The device snaps in place with a confident click. My wish is to get a version which allows you to attach a Gopro device underneath. 

Profile

Switching pages in a profle is fast and easy. It is a great benefit to have both hardware buttons and being able to swipe. I love the graphical fields like HR or power zone, or elevation. They really use the richness of the screen. 

I would like to get multiple map views in the profile, each with a different zoom level or view. This would make it easy to get a ride overview, or switch to a detail view in cities or complex situations.

Another thing I would like is that the sensors I use would be linked to a profile. For example on outdoor profiles I would love to use the GPS, while when I am on my trainer I would like to turn that off. 

Screen

The screen is brilliant, but it would be great to have auto brightness. now I had to change the brightness manually, as I was riding into the evening. 

General

In general I think the K2 is great device, with a  brilliant screen and fast routing. I love the ease of synchronization. But the experience is a bit cumbersome at times. Like the battery life, having to check if my power meter is recording, or false positive or late TBT notifications. That said I see Hammerhead is making improvements continuously and I really appreciate the bi weekly updates. One request would be to get a glimpse of the roadmap going forward.