I’m curious about these (both the v1 and v2) but there seems to be relatively little real world insight beyond DC Rainmaker’s reviews. The technical details are fairly easy to discover, but when it comes to bike GPSs the Devil’s in the detail, and I’ve yet to find a device that doesn’t have lots of devil.

I’m particularly interested in:

• Battery life
• General usability in conjunction with an iPhone
• Ease of getting routes on there from RideWithGPS or by downloading GPX files on an iPhone into Files
• Navigation quality
• How well it understands tarmac vs unsurfaced trails and whether I want to be on one or the other (particularly when rerouting on the fly)
• Whether you can display the map “north up” when navigating (which you can’t on Wahoos)
• Configurability of the map display (whether via options on the device itself or by installing custom mapping as you can, and I do, with Garmins)
• How well it works with full-finger gloves, including the times when you want to zoom out and pan around to see where you want to go next when you’re not sticking rigidly to a route
• Whether there’s anything useful that can be done by sideloading Android APKs
• How much real world benefit is offered by the v2

I’ve no interest in training data, external sensors or anything like that, I just want good navigation and ease of use and the ability to keep going all day.

What’s your current set-up?

Whether you can display the map “north up” when navigating (which you can’t on Wahoos)

I have a suspicion that you can on Wahoos, you know.

Just out of interest, is there a GPS device that you haven’t owned? 😉

What’s your current set-up?

A Garmin Edge Explore and an Edge 810 (not at the same time).

I have a suspicion that you can on Wahoos, you know.

Unless they’ve changed it recently, which would surprise me, you can if you’re just viewing the map, but if you’re following a route then you’re only allowed to do it with the map rotating to direction of travel.

Just out of interest, is there a GPS device that you haven’t owned? 😉

Well, the Karoo obviously 😉 And Lezynes. And Sigma. But I’ve certainly had a fair few Garmins and a couple of Wahoos.

Battery life

I find it very good. I’ve done 70 mile road rides on under half a battery. On the other hand, it did catch me out the other day by plummeting from 18% to turning itself off on a fairly short ride, and there are plenty of people on forums moaning about lack of battery life.

General usability in conjunction with an iPhone

Android here, but the only interaction it has with my phone is message notifications, which works pretty well.

Ease of getting routes on there from RideWithGPS or by downloading GPX files on an iPhone into Files

It has to go via their dashboard. I dislike the cloud dependency, but it’s fairly painless. There are some issues with it not liking some flavours of GPX files. I’ve not tried RWGPS, but have to export from bikehike as a GPX track rather than route. It may be possible to get a route onto it via adb, but I’ve never tried.

Navigation quality

Very good.

How well it understands tarmac vs unsurfaced trails and whether I want to be on one or the other (particularly when rerouting on the fly)

I’ve not yet tried navigation off road, but on road re-routing has kept me on road.

Whether you can display the map “north up” when navigating (which you can’t on Wahoos)

Yes, just press the compass icon.

Configurability of the map display (whether via options on the device itself or by installing custom mapping as you can, and I do, with Garmins)

Non-existent, as far as I know.

How well it works with full-finger gloves, including the times when you want to zoom out and pan around to see where you want to go next when you’re not sticking rigidly to a route

Not great, unless they have touchscreen compatible tips, in which case it works well. That said, they have done a pretty good job of making common operations, including zoom, accessible via hardware buttons.

Whether there’s anything useful that can be done by sideloading Android APKs

Not that I’ve yet discovered.

How much real world benefit is offered by the v2

Never tried the v1. I decided it was too big, and the lack of a beeper of any form would be a bit of a killer for navigation and other notification.

They are doing regular software updates. Last week’s finally added mixed units (distance in miles, temperature in °C, etc) and added a new “drawer” thing for getting to notifications an navigation information during a ride, which I think works pretty well.

My device history is Garmin Edge 305, 800, 820 and briefly a Wahoo Bolt. This is definitely the best so far.

I’m close to choosing something other than Garmin (use a 520plus) last night I wanted to load a course onto it, and of course it was at that point either Connect or the unit itself decided that it won’t sync. So then spent a thankless hour discarding the 520plus from Connect then trying to sync it or pair it or un-pair it, then turning off and on the phone, turning the app on and off again, then checking updates on Garmin Express (why is this two separate things Garmin?) and then trying again to connect the two…finally randomly; it managed it.

I’m unsure even now if I turn on the 520 it’s paired to the phone…[sigh] Might have a look at the Hammerhead. It surely can’t be worse.

I’m really interested in this too. Pretty much done with Garmins and don’t need training data.

I need a unit with good off-road navigation (world wide, eventually….) and easy to import GPX. I can’t find much info on this either, just roadie based reviews. Ideally I’d like to be able to import third party map layers, but I don’t think that is possible. Apparently the Karoo maps are very similar to Open Bike Maps (so no OS options in the uK, IGN in France etc).

Don’t you get a no-questions-asked trial period with the Karoo?

75 mile road ride today with screen on full brightness and navigation the whole way round, and still on over 65% when I got back. No sensors, but connected to my phone for messages.

GPX import is pretty painless via their dashboard. The unit connects via wifi to load new routes, and unlike wretched (recent) Garmins, you can choose the sort order so you can get to the newest route without scrolling through pages of routes on a sluggish UI.

Don’t you get a no-questions-asked trial period with the Karoo?

I believe so.

Hopefully going to do some off-road miles on Sunday so will report back on off road navigation.

Interesting thread

I’ve had a Karoo since the initial kickstarter a few years ago, so the v1. I believe the v2 runs a bit slower but does have the beep and a smaller footprint. I don’t give a hoot about the beep so have never felt it as an issue.

Navigation is superb. Clear and easy to follow with rapid rerouting. Note – never used offroad though.

Screen quality is immense. It works fine with gloves for me in terms of the touchscreen aspect.

Battery is good too. 100 mile rides just fine. Hammerhead push out firmware updates every 2 weeks or so and I must confess the latest 2 have left my unit confused about battery – it tells me its low when it’s not and offers to go into energy saving mode. I just recalibrate the battery which is easy.

I’ve been accused of having an iPad attached to my bike but I like the big screen,and really like the clarity and interface.

One 100 mile ride and it needs a charge? That’s awful, would be on charge all the time.

Rob, in my experience the charge entirely depends on what you do with it. I run it with a 3G connection for rerouting rides (you can put a 3g card in the Karoo and it uses little data so I have an essentially free one from 3 in it), I have the Bluetooth running connected to my power meter and was running the screen on navigation at reasonable brightness. You can put it into battery save mode when it turns the screen off and only switches the screen back on when it’s about to navigate you somewhere or when you turn it on whichnwould give you more time I suspect.

I’ve found the Hammerhead support good and the fortnightly firmware upgrades combined with an android operating system mean the machine feels light years ahead of Garmins or Mios.

You can sideload android apps onto it but I’ve not bothered.

Well, I’ve just bought one. It seriously can’t be any worse than Garmin, and I’m so done with their software issues.

• Battery life

Seems OK

• General usability in conjunction with an iPhone

Pointless, all it does is sync your notifications

• Ease of getting routes on there from RideWithGPS or by downloading GPX files on an iPhone into Files

Seems OK, but it really wants you to use its “Dashboard” website for downloaded and faffing with maps and routes

• Navigation quality

Bad Off road, won’t even follow pretty rudimentary BW, It’s clearly designed as a roadie thing

• How well it understands tarmac vs unsurfaced trails and whether I want to be on one or the other (particularly when rerouting on the fly)

Bad, will reroute to a road

• Whether you can display the map “north up” when navigating (which you can’t on Wahoos)

Yes, you can do this

• Configurability of the map display (whether via options on the device itself or by installing custom mapping as you can, and I do, with Garmins)

No, can’t configure the map display other than normal zoom features, map is a massive step up from anything Garmn has though hugely better

• How well it works with full-finger gloves, including the times when you want to zoom out and pan around to see where you want to go next when you’re not sticking rigidly to a route

Yeah, pretty good with gloves, I had no issues with touch sensitive fingertip gloves

• Whether there’s anything useful that can be done by sideloading Android APKs

Didn’t try

• How much real world benefit is offered by the v2

Bought a V2. It’s going back. It’s really good as a map, the display is the very best I’ve ever used.  But the “Ecosystem” (sorry) is clearly designed around using 3rd party apps like Strava, if you don’t use Strava then all the dashboard will give you is a map of your route. If you want say; a graphical representation of your time in HR zone, or the point on the route where you had max power output or highest cadence, their answer is “Go to Strava for that” if you say “I don’t have a Strava acct” their answer is “Here’s how to set one up”.

If you want all your data all within one place, forget the Hammerhead,it won’t do that. Shame, it’s pretty good at some things, but for £360 it’s got some massive gaps in it’s “offer” (again, apologies)

Oh, the out front mount is pretty good, and the in the box adapter for Garmin mounts is a nice touch, although whoever designed it did a bad job as it’s undersized and so the head unit rattles about a bit on really rough stuff, it won’t come out, but how much this bothers you is a personal thing I guess, the Head unit itself is bloody massive BTW.

Bad Off road, won’t even follow pretty rudimentary BW, It’s clearly designed as a roadie thing

Not my experience. I did a long off-road ride last weekend and it worked very well. As with any device, off-road navigation is entirely dependent on the underlying map knowing about the path you’re trying to follow. Karoo uses OpenStreeMap data, so if the path isn’t on there, it won’t be able to give you turn-by-turn navigation.

The above picture is the device happily navigating on a bridleway. The junction in 0.7miles is a junction between two bridleways.

What I like about it is that whatever happens, it’ll show you the route that you plotted as the big obvious yellow line. If the map doesn’t know about the path that you’re on it’ll attempt to re-route you onto one that it does, but you can just ignore it and carry on following the the yellow line.

The red line on the picture is your planned route, fitted onto the nearest path that it knows about. In this case, I plotted my route using a series of straight lines, but if you use fit-to-road when plotting your route, the red line is typically invisible because it’s underneath the yellow line.

Personally I’m glad they didn’t waste time attempting to reimplement Strava. The dashboard is a simple and easy way to get stuff on and off the device which is all I want.

Personally I’m glad they didn’t waste time attempting to reimplement Strava.

Sure, if you’re already a Strava user it’s no biggie, if like me, you don’t want Strava, they don’t have an system to show even simple data (like the heart rate zones for instance) I don’t want it to replicate Strava but to not bother at all with anything, is shoddy (given how much it costs)

Mine tried to follow a route today and it was a beep-tastic hot mess of trying to re-route itself every 30 seconds or so. Drove me nuts frankly

Thanks for those notes.

Personally I have no interest in any performance data whatsoever, I just want to get a route onto it from RideWithGPS with zero faff and then follow it (or divert from it as necessary) with the best mapping and navigation quality possible—and there are lots of devils in the detail there.

Big head units are no bad thing with ageing eyes 😀

with the best mapping and navigation quality possible—and there are lots of devils in the detail there.

The display is miles away from Garmin in terms of simplicity and clarity, as @pdw says up there, you can simply follow the line on the screen, but like all head units it has it own ideas about which way you’re actually going. Mine yesterday had a 10min epi-scopie about the route I was taking for whatever reason, and decided that it was going to try to re-route me, and did so with gay abandon. A glitch in the Matrix? Something in settings I’d not figured out? Probably user error, but there was a road next to where I was, and it absolutely wanted to be on that road rather than the wee piece of  singletrack next to it…

“BEEEP, get on that road…BEEEP oh, you still aren’t on it, BEEEP, are you on the road yet? BEEP…here let me help you out to get to that road over there. BEEEEPPP….what about that nice road …BEEEP…and so on and so on….

I’m not a data-fiend by any stretch of the imagination, but even Garmin will let me see out things like my top speed down a hill, or say Max HR when I’m climbing, straight on my phone. It’s some thing just for fun (or what passes for fun) but the Hammerhead Dashboard will only show you a map, a graph of height gain and loss, and ave and max HR and Speed, if that’s enough for you, then really apart from the annoying routing thing (which to be fair they all do to a greater or lesser extent) then it’s def worth a look.

Oh, and it’s big…Did I mention it’s big…it’s big.

Tbh got the 1st wahoo edge,Garmin 1000 and the v1 Karoo and tbh I think none of them er satisfy my needs in a slick way.

IMHO Navigation on bike units (as we want)still doesn’t seem to have been nailed quite yet.

Crossing the streams seems to be instant navigation death for the Garmin so planning routes that don’t cross seems to be the only way around that.

As bez says big screens are great for eyes and being able to use it as a map when the auto navigation goes into melt down is a win in my eyes.

Daring to actually turn around on my Garmin once it has got a komoot course loaded is very annoying, I should probably figure out how to reverse the course but tbh I don’t see why the unit isn’t asking do I want to return.

The usability doesn’t seem to be there and they er aren’t the cheapest things.

Yeah, the beeps are annoying if struggling to re-route, but you can turn audio alerts off on the pull down status bar thingy.

It’d be nice if it had a navigation mode where it simply beeped if you got too far away from your planned route and didn’t even attempt re-routing or turn-by-turn.

with the best mapping and navigation quality possible

I was leading a road ride through a town I didn’t know yesterday in the rain, and it was brilliant. The mapping was much clearer and more readable than my Garmin is in a built-up area, and I could still easily zoom in and out using the hardware buttons.

So it does it try and reroot even if you’re on your planned route?

@ampthill, yeah mine had a route that I was following, I’m pretty sure that I’d just not programmed the route properly, and that section it thought it should be on a road (about 30m to the left of where I actually was) luckily for me the singletrack finished quite close to a corner of the road (that it was trying to get me to re-route to) so it triumphantly announced that we were back en-route, what I had been thinking for the last 10mins? And could we please try to stick to the route from now on please…and was pretty well behaved for the rest of the ride. It still got confused at other places, there was an effective straight-on that the Hammerhead decided was a right turn, but I wasn’t assaulted by the BEEP chorus at least  this time, and it soon worked itself out.

@nickcI I just have trail of bread crumbs on my watch. I keep thinking I should get something for my handlebars. Plus make once a ride I have to get my phone out as something doesn’t make sense.

But trail of bread crumbs has the huge benefit that it really doesn’t care what you actually do. It’s merely a suggestion

They mostly all do what i describe to a greater or lesser degree. Take the 2nd instance I described earlier when I wanted to go straight ahead and the Hammerhead thought I should turn right. Now in this particular instance, I knew I was gong straight on, and the Hammerhead, soon caught up, but had I been unfamiliar with the area, I would’ve turned right, the Hammerhead would’ve realised I was going the wrong way, and beeped at me to re-route…It’s not really a biggie in the grand scheme of things, but it’s annoying if it keeps on happening.

I presume the race between these units is to have head units more closely/accurately follow the map, and I’d guess that most users are going to these are roadies where that’s super useful. I think it’s going to be a bigger and bigger problem for off-road routing though, and  @pdw nails it when he suggests that whats needed is either a “sensitivity to route following” selection, or a function that allows the user to know he’s off course, and then the unit STFU about it.

Karoo uses OpenStreeMap data, so if the path isn’t on there, it won’t be able to give you turn-by-turn navigation.

And if the path isn’t there, sign up to OSM and add it yourself.

The display is miles away from Garmin in terms of simplicity and clarity

To be fair, one nice thing about Garmin is that you can load custom mapping. I mean, actually creating those custom maps is a hideously painful process involving paying for some fairly awful third-party software and a lot of time and trial and error, but I’ve done it and I’ve got some nice clear mapping, way better (for me at least) than Garmin’s house style. So I’m actually ok for clarity.

Still think my oringinal map-less Aa powered Garmin was best for “off course” routing. I had the breadcrumb screen set up with
– distance off course
– arrow pointing at direction to route.

love my k2. The 1030+ i had prior was nothing but a royal p.i.t.a. with it’s crashes and hangs and such.
The off road nav is actually not that bad but you do need to make sure you’ve set the route type
in the dashboard’s route config …. road/gravel/mtb … currently only tried road and gravel though
so can’t comment or confirm about real mtb trails.

Battery life is “acceptable” and can be tweaked if you’re running low on a ride – about a week’s worth of commuting for me – 2 hours a day will see it needing a charger by Friday, but commuting is
display only as I don’t have any of the additional sensors connected for this and a couple of 4-6 hour weekend rides will result in the same – bit like my android phone really so quite used to
charging devices regularly !

Sorry not sorry for resurrecting this thread… 10 months is quite a lot of two-weekly updates, have any of you Karoo users noticed any significant improvements during that time?

I found the thread because I’m looking at getting one, but purely because although I love my old Garmin Edge 800 for showing me data and showing a line on a map I can follow (I turn navigation off as I don’t like the “you are very slightly off route” beeps), I can’t upload to Strava or Garmin Connect or RWGPS or whatever without physically connecting to a computer, which isn’t possible on long multi-day rides.

I’ve just bought a Karoo after a recommendation from my LBS. Only used it twice so far but initial impressions are good. I’m expecting good things from it in terms if integration with my AXS drivetrain and other such stuff. Main thing I want is decent navigation when I use it for that, which isn’t all the time, but I want it to work when I do as I occasionally lead group rides and there’s nothing worse than awful satnav…