Garmin Edge 840 to new Karoo observations + feature requests
Hi, I came over to the new Karoo (*cough* 3 *cough*) from a Garmin Edge 840 and before that Wahoo since pre-order on the original Bolt 1 and wanted to share a few observations and feature requests.
Context (because YMMV!): I'm an experienced cyclist in the US northeast riding a mix of pavement and gravel (and limited MTB) in urban/suburban/rural areas, up to 125 milers in peak months. My main bike is an all-road with SRAM Force AXS. I'm not racing nor deep into anyone's ecosystem. I route plan in RWGPS and post-ride push primarily to Strava and RWGPS.
FEATURE REQUESTS:
1. SRAM AXS END GEAR RANGE AUDIO ALERTS. I love the graphical AXS integration, but I miss the Garmin audio beep when you're hitting the end of the cassette. Nice to have a subtle "sorry bro, you're out of gears!" alert when climbing.
2. CRASH DETECTION AND ALERT. Like insurance, you hope you never need it -- and don't really appreciate it until you do... In event of a crash detection, Garmin beeps and if you don't dismiss the on-screen prompt within a few seconds they text your emergency contact via your mobile phone a note and link to your latest GPS location. Could literally save your life. I've seen this logged as "planned" for a few years... Come on SRAMmerhead, make it happen!
3. AUTO-REROUTE PROMPTING. Instead of auto-rerouting (which is wicked fast and quite good), prompt to ask if you want it. Sometimes you intentionally leave your route and don't wan't to keep being bugged on how to get back to it (nor waste battery on endless rerouting).
OBSERVATIONS:
-
BATTERY LIFE: Good, phew! This was my biggest concern coming from the runs-forever Garmin Edge 840, With auto-bright on, moderate to heavy navigation/map use, and HR/cadence/AXS sensors active, I still had plenty of battery life left at the end of the day. Having a good baseline, I'm now comfy playing with extensions that may get hungry. Happy to carry a small power bank for the device and my phone on my most extreme days... Haven't had the opportunity to use in really cold weather yet, but my rides are shorter then :) Hope the battery stays relatively strong over time (all device batteries degrade...) and through future firmware upgrades.
-
UI: Love it! Crisp, clear, relatively intuitive, and continuously improving with frequent firmware updates. Like the drawers -- just keep optimizing how they pop up and vanish. Menus are a tad sluggish after the slower initial boot up, but smooth after that first view. UI much better than the Garmin Edge 840 (whose big firmware UI update seemed optimized for the larger Edge 1040). Thought I'd struggle more with Garmin muscle memory, but nope.
-
NAVIGATION/ROUTING -- Great. Beautiful maps, clear navigation. Every device has their underlying routing quirks (e.g. route says go straight for 3 miles when at mile 1.5 you're actually forking slightly to a new road. Don't think the actual routing is overall worse or better than Garmin -- just different. Navigating to drop ping on phone Google/Apple Maps is great. Uploading offline maps is easy over wifi and thankfully in bite-sized regions vs. Garmin's mind-boggling decision to have massive geo regions that choke the device and probably their servers even when wired to your laptop (forget about wifi).
-
ROUTING ELEVATION GAINS -- eh, not terrible, but jury is still out and room for improvement. Okay, I've read the Karoo 2 barometer horror stories Karoo 2 and thankfully I'm not experiencing any of that on my 3. But what I am seeing when importing routes from RWGPS are 10-15+% discrepancies between the RWGPS initial routing, then what the Karoo says after importing, what the Karoo actually calculates for the ride, and further differences when Strava and RWGPS do their post-ride export calculations. For same rides I did on the Garmin, there are 10-15% differences. Sometimes the Karoo is over the others, sometimes under. Which is the closest to truth is anyone's guess! In some areas, Garmin seems to have more accurate bridge data vs the Karoo in routing, which can account for Karoo predicting hundreds of feet additional ascent. Based on other posts I've seen out there, there's clearly room for optimization here.
-
HARDWARE: really solid. Gorgeous screen, solid build, great buttons that i often use instead of touch screen, sturdy port cover (an odd struggle for some other devices).
- INTEGRATIONS/EXTENSIONS: fine for me. I can import routes from RWGPS, and auto-push post ride to RWGPS and Strava from where I can go further if I want to. Some quality extensions with more on the way. Extensions are expanding and I'm starting to play. All good for me, but I'm not deep into training platforms or anything esoteric.
All in all, I'm happy with my Karoo 3 and look forward to seeing the optimizations that come down the line.
-
Funny that the Ki2 extension has the out of gears beep but not in native support. If you are leaving your route I would normally just cancel the route from the control centre (swipe down or press top left & right buttons together). I’d rather have that than a pop up happening if you are one street away from the route.
Simon
-
Funny that the Ki2 extension has the out of gears beep but not in native support.
@simon, ya, I searched extensively before posting because I was certain there must be a way to enable it and I just hadn't figured it out.. Nope! :) One of those little things that I didn't appreciate how useful it was until I no longer had it.
-
2. CRASH DETECTION AND ALERT. Like insurance, you hope you never need it -- and don't really appreciate it until you do... In event of a crash detection, Garmin beeps and if you don't dismiss the on-screen prompt within a few seconds they text your emergency contact via your mobile phone a note and link to your latest GPS location. Could literally save your life. I've seen this logged as "planned" for a few years... Come on SRAMmerhead, make it happen!
100% agree. I would love this for peace of mind.
For auto adjusting routes, I think a pop up would be unnecessary. You can swipe down and turn of re-routing, but the majority of time I think people would want auto routing. As always a setting where you can enable that would be beneficial, but I think there are better uses of the Karoo team's efforts
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
3 comments