Seems like a semi useful gadet for road riding..
OR.. Is it just a gadet too far for everyday riders??

Normally just use strava for keeping mileage tabs.

Depends if you like stats and knowing what your cadence/hr is.

I have a 500 and wouldn’t be without one but I like numbers and like to try to keep a cadence above 80.

My concern is getting too bothered about numbers and forgetting why im out for a ride..

Well you can set the screens to display any number of things. On my main screen I have distance, time ridden, elevation, current time, current hr and current cadence. I don’t get fixated on any in particular but in general I have some target in mind – either distance, time or elevation gain.

500 is my favourite bike computer. The custom screens are excellent and most of my riding is done to a HR graph and cadence screen (three displays; Graph/HR/cadence). For racing I use Time/Lap time/Laps. For general commuting I have a screen with 10 stats. The profiles are a little agricultural compared with the newer 510/810 (which I also have). But the form factor is absolutely perfect.

cloudnine – Member
My concern is getting too bothered about numbers and forgetting why im out for a ride..

I have a 500 and it’s great, I couldn’t care less about HR or cadence, but my phone battery is not so great so decided to pick up a 500, (which I got cheap). Just shove it in my camelbak while riding and use it for recording the ride. Seems more accurate and reliable that the phone so far as well.

Edge 500 great little gadget and I recommend getting one. Miles better than Strava on the mobile phone.

If you’re not really paying much attention to your HR or Cadence then no don’t get the additional bits.

If you’re doing any kind of structured training or plan then HR and Cadence is useful. Unless you have a power meter.

Edge 500 is great for everyday riding. Very easy to use once you get over the initial setup. HRM and cadence depends on your riding, but I wouldn’t be without the HRM. It’s not something I use all the time, but great for training and fast rides.

Yup love mine and find it very useful without being over-complex.

Love mine.

Love mine. Hr, cadence etc on the road bike, just shoved in the backpack on the mtb. Great little device.

Love mine as I’m a stats geek. It’s been faultless for the three years I’ve owned it.

Very useful if you like that sort of thing. I’ve also got an 810 and the amount of time the 500 takes to acquire satellites is significantly slower, and quite annoying if you’re recording commutes and need to be gone, just to make you aware. The new models allow you to tailor screens and settings to different styles of riding (auto pause on for road, off for mtb, heart rate graphs for road, etc) and I found it a little annoying switching things on and off in settings each time on the 500. Other than that it’s a great little unit; I bought it as Strava was killing my phone battery.

Like mine a lot.
Another good aspect of the wheel sensor is that it gives an independent record of speed so you don’t get the odd spikes you can get on gps only. Plus it gets over the problem above of taking a while to pick up a gps signal. And you can use it indoors when a gps is not much use. I have multiple sensors on different bikes and have found over time it’s not happy about swappin between them, so best to have just one speed/cadence sensor per head unit.

Edge 500 with HRM and CAD £149.99

Seems like a pretty decent deal to me. I have an Edge 810 and only use the basic functions on it, a 500 would have done exactly what I needed.

Now Started looking at the 510 due to the wifi capability.

Conversely to all the Edge 500 love above, I find mine a glitchy pain in the ass.

The main button randomly stops working which is apparently a software fault that requires a hard reset, but the button you need to press to do that is the one that stops working.
The battery life indicator is permanently on 100% and if you follow a course it won’t display it all the time on the screen. It shows the straight road sections but then disappears when you get anywhere near a turn which is useful.
Switching between bikes in the menu system is clunky and again uses the button that works intermittently…

I rang Garmin about all the issues and they suggested a regular hard reset or buy a more modern unit.

I’ll also side with being a bit of a non-lover of the 500, as long as you don’t use the courses functions it’s a nice bike computer with added GPS recording. I use mine for quick evening blasts when I know where I’ll be going.

If you plan on using the courses functionality look elsewhere. It regularly tells you that you’re off course when you’re bang on the line of the breadcrumb trail, then the course randomly vanishes. This is well documented on various forums.

Battery life is fine as long as you don’t use courses, I’ve never run it flat when used just as a computer. On the other hand it won’t go much beyond 3 hours if you’re following a course.

When I was looking at a GPS enabled bike computer a couple of years ago the choice was basically 500/510/800/810. I discounted the 800 series as my wife has one and I didn’t need the map functionality so it came down to the 500/510.

Quite a few in our club had/have the 500 which is barely bigger than something like one of the old Cateye bike computers but in the end I went for the 510 as I preferred the larger screen and since it was newer there would be better support in the long term. I got the unit/HRM/cadence package.

Conversely to all the Edge 500 love above, I find mine a glitchy pain in the ass.

…

The main button randomly stops working which is apparently a software fault that requires a hard reset

Never had this in the two years I’ve owned mine and it gets used a lot, and in some pretty poor weather. Did have an issue once when I unplugged it from the computer and it became stuck in a kind of standby mode with the standby icon on screen. Thought I’d killed it for a second, but a hard reset by holding all the buttons pressed quickly fixed it.

…and if you follow a course it won’t display it all the time on the screen. It shows the straight road sections but then disappears when you get anywhere near a turn which is useful.

As much as I love mine, this is actually a right pain in the arse. From what I gather from the research I did, is that it happens when there aren’t two track points on the visible screen, so it doesn’t know where to trace the line to or whatever. It can be fixed by zooming out, but when you zoom out a lot of detail is taken out of the breadcrumb trail and it can become hard to follow. Fine on long country road in the middle of nowhere. Not so good in urban environments, and I wouldn’t like to follow it off road. I use an Etrex when navigation is the priority, but it’s still the 500 that gets used on 99% of my road rides.

butcher – Member

Never had this in the two years I’ve owned mine and it gets used a lot, and in some pretty poor weather.

Yeah, mine gets used a fair bit in all weathers. When I spoke to the bloke at Garmin he didn’t sound unduly surprised and when I said I thought it was a mechanical fault with the button, he said no, it was likely to be a software glitch and a hard reset should solve it.
Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, but getting the hard reset to actually occur is the hard bit as you have to use the non functioning button to do the reset.

Tell you what…you fancy a swap given that yours has never done it.

Yeah, your reasoning behind the lack of a trail is what I have seen described too, but seems like a massive lack of foresight by Garmin to me.
The best way I found to get around it was to use gpsies.com to plot routes as there is the option to upload with evenly spacing the course points so they are still there, even on a straight road.
But, recently this has stopped working for some reason (I assumed I had too many activities on it), but deleting them hasn’t helped, and it now also shows a large circle around,d my position as if it isn’t really sure where I am.

Disappointing device really, when you think how much they cost. I’d get a different brand next time, but I don’t think there’s any real alternative options.

Get fed up of looking at which one to get and decided the wifi / bluetooth feature of the 510 was a winner so bought from amazon for £218 with the HRM and cadence. Dit try Flubit but could only beat that price by a fiver.