Improving Support for Mountain Biking (MTB)
The Karoo appears to be one of the best options for road and street use, but has room for improvement when it comes to MTB support. I don't own a Karoo yet and the only reason why I'm hesitating is because MTB support does not seem ideal.
I understand that some would like full trailforks integration, but personally, I'd be happy with less support. I'd be more than happy with
- trail names displayed on the map (ideally with adjustable font size).
- trail difficulty visualised on the map (via colours or numeric badges), or at least easily accessible from the map (e.g., by long pressing on a trail name).
- menu of available trails in an area ("trails nearby" would do).
Some trails can only be used in one direction. Navigation would ideally respect such details and a chosen maximum difficulty level (the map display could allow filtering of trails depending on their difficulty level).
If it is too difficult to provide the above via the base map, I'd be content with the ability to add trails myself (providing the route details, trail name, trail difficulty, etc. myself). The difference to adding a single route (as currently possible already) would be that the Karoo would be aware of all trails that have been manually added so far. The Karoo should have access to all trails that have been added in the past without requiring the phone to be online. Trails may be in areas without cell phone reception and some users may not want to use mobile data in general.
I realise that adding a single route is possible already but it would be far better if one could see other trails nearby in the field while riding and had the ability to use alternative trails in case the previously loaded trail is in very bad condition or blocked.
It might be necessary to make re-routing optional since the latter relies on known routes and not all available routes might be known, leading to unhelpful rerouting suggestions. EDIT: It appears that re-routing can be temporarily be disabled already due to a recent update. That's great!
Not owning a Karoo yet, some items of the above wishlist may already be ticked; apologies if that is the case. In any event, I believe that adding better MTB support for the Karoo would open a significant market. I've did quite a bit of research and found that many eschewed the Karoo due to its lacking MTB support. One major reason why "feature requests for trailforks integration" (<- this is a link) are not more popular could be that users who would upvote such threads are not considering a Karoo in the first place and thus never visit this forum.
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Crickets?
Why did SRAM acquire Hammerhead to then do nothing with the product?
Is there anything to expect? Will patience pay off?
I'm looking to upgrade to a new biking computer but in its current form the Karoo 3, while great in many ways, is not usable (requires online connection for street navigation and does not appear to offer sufficient support for riding trails).
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