Garmin Edge Explore 1000
We were each bought one as a wedding gift, and they have been amazing on tour. Being able to do navigation, both with directions and prompts as well as just having a map, with no need to be connected to the internet is quite wonderful. However they are not perfect (yes Garmin, read this, get in touch, put us on a beta team and give us some stuff).
Firstly, all data input is via the touch screen, but the keyboard layout is A-Z, with no option to switch to a QWERTY which we are all 100% more used to.
One of the 5 icons on the screen is for an Emergency Contact, which cannot be set on the device, and I have not yet figured out how to do this via the Garmin Connect app, manual in hand.
Settings seem to change themselves when power is plugged in, so we had to check the backlight was off each day. There should be a button to put it in Eco mode in the drop-down menu: a shortcut to turn off WiFi, Bluetooth, backlight etc.
Route calculation works pretty well in the absence of hills, however asking it to calculate a route with the least ascent shoved us up a bunch of 16% gradients when there were perfectly acceptable roads with cyclable inclines. We found it impossible to figure out which the signposted route was, and resorted to using them old fashioned road sign devices for the last 10km going into Urbino, rather than pushing up what I referred to as a “wall”. Selecting a destination is a bit of an issue, as the Course Creator option demands a postcode and street address, when most of my riding is out of town and headed to either a street or-more often-a village: I can’t ask the Course Creator to take me to Roslin, despite its being a village of just a couple of streets from which I knew how to get home on the new cycle route.
Being able to specify the avoidance of inclines over a given gradient would be useful.
Being able to view a climbing profile of a given route without having to exit navigation and start a new route would also be handy, ideally allowing the Elevation screen to show the full route and where you are currently on it! The Elevation screen currently shows what you have already climbed recently, which is not hugely useful.
The position of the charge port inhibits charging whilst riding when the head unit is in portrait orientation (unless you have an integrated handlebar/stem). This is silly for touring when the battery only lasts around 10h of use.
I read somewhere that the internal memory of the Edge 1000 was only good for recording a limited number of hours’ activities, so I purchased a couple of 64gb SD cards, and changed the settings to record to SD. I just checked the card after 14 days of recording long hours, and the card shows up as empty, with all activities and courses stored in the Garmin’s internal memory (19 ‘activities’ and 1.4gb available. The ‘activites’ are under 100kb, so there is clearly no need for the SD card until we need to add USA maps). I double checked the settings, so this is clearly another minor issue with the OS.
Tobias
