CLIMBER: First impressions
Planned
Hi guys,
Congratulations first of all for the ongoing updates and for following the strategy of listening to your customers, although it must be difficult to have a development strategy that satisfies everyone. As has been said many times in this forum, many of us come from Garmin and I'm delighted with HH functionalities, your development policy and your constant innovation.
In my case the lack of a CLIMBER functionality, being a more or less a constant rider of no more than a couple of rides a week, was one of the things I most expected from HH and that sometimes, just sometimes, reminded me of Garmin. Now I'm just waiting for the functionality of a pop up on the map before the turns, that should be a kind of TURNING with the same philosophy as CLIMBER.
Since last Friday when I downloaded the latest version I have consciously planned a couple of routes for this Saturday and Sunday, about 50-60 km with clearly differentiated climbs and descents to do my own CLIMBER test. It's a feature that has always interested me, as it allows me to be prepared for the climb and plan my effort with a good strategy based on the gradients ahead of me, their intensity and distance.
My first impressions of CLIMBER are not very positive, and I have repeated several ascents to see if it was me who didn't quite understand how it works. In short, these are my impressions:
1. The identification of the climbs, the distance and elevation to the top are probably correct. I do plan in strava and sync directly via dashboard and indeed the warning of the climb occurs before the ascent.
2. The segmentation of the entire climb into colour-code bars is also probably correct, although it is difficult to check.
but
3. Definitely when I try to keep my focus on the next 500m and the 5 colour segments that make it up is when I think it doesn't work. Very steep segments are shown in CLIMBER as green colour-code and smoother chunks as red colour-code..... In the 'gradient field' Karoo does show a high gradient in the first case (as in reality) and a low gradient in the second, it is the position of the 'current location' in CLIMBER that I think is wrong.
4. It is presumably a question of an incorrect position of 'current location' in CLIMBER, showing a current location and therefore a segment colour that is not the current one. Moving the current location to the correct segment would fix it. I have the impression that there is a shifting, I don't know if it is forwards or backwards, of the whole graph with respect to the current location.
5. In some cases, with a good part of the climb still to go, CLIMBER has already finished and in others CLIMBER has not yet finished and I have already reached the top of the climb.
I don't know if it's just my impressions or if other users have experienced the same thing, what is certain is that the way it currently works, or at least on my device, it is useless for me.
Thank you very much and keep innovating !!!
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This morning I gave Climber another chance, a route with clear uphill (and downhill) parts to check again how climber works.
It was again a festival of colours, with great excitement every time the climber countdown started, but from then on it was a totally random series of small coloured segments that had absolutely nothing to do with the ground. Again, flat uphill parts were showed as ominous warnings of steep gradients, and when you were relaxed, the hardest parts of the climb came while climber indicated that you were in a series of greens including negative gradients.
And of course, several metres short of the top, climber would congratulate you with a 'you made it'. Funnily enough, the 'Upcoming elevation' graph did seem to work well when it showed you that you were not yet at the top of the climb.
It's quite possible that climber is not entirely to blame and possibly works well on long road climbs, but definitely not for MTB, possibly because of partial loss of GPS signal and the difficulty of breaking the climb into 100m sections when the ground is so variable.
I still think, it's just a feeling, that it might be an offset problem as I stated in the original post, but I still have no feedback from HH, even if it was one showing interest like send us the .fit or we're working on it..
My confidence in HH is total, and I hope that in the next versions these problems will be solved.
Have a nice weekend!
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Great idea of a feature, to start with!
BUT:
- Same offset issues here, it seems predicted and real position are 500m off from each other.
- When climb is shown, map routing gets overlaid in an annoying way: Actual position arrow is covered, you have no idea whether you miss the next run or not. Climb feature and map should co-exist without sacrificing the map part to such an extent!
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