The new one, not the 1000 or 820 variants.

I tried a second time to live with a Wahoo and this time it was so awful I didn’t even bother going for a ride with it. It’s back in it’s box and being sent back to whence it came. So, much to my dismay, I’m looking at Garmin again for something to replace my (actually fairly trustworthy) Touring Plus.

Interested in your thoughts and experiences of the Explore. Particularly:

– Battery life. A quoted life of 12 hours looks a bit feeble to me, given that I can normally only scrape about 10 at most out of units that quote 14 hours. But I’ve seen suggestion that the Explore will get close to 12 using battery saver mode… true or not? And how long will it co without?

– Display clarity in daylight. Any better than earlier models like the 800 and 1000?

– Reliability of auto-resuming recording after a pause. IME Garmins are a nightmare for not bothering to record again once you’ve stopped for food. They seem to cope with short pauses like stopping at the lights, but my big rides generally have huge gaps in them after stops where it’s taken me ages to realise the distance reading isn’t changing.

But generally the Explore seems to get good reviews; would the STW hive mind agree?

Right. Fat lot of use you lot are so far 🙂

Bought one. We’ll see how it goes.

Let’s get really ambitious with finding someone to help: has anyone sideloaded new maps (eg Openfietsmap) onto the Explore? No SD card slot, so they can’t go in that way. I’m assuming they can simply be copied on via USB in the usual Garmin manner, but what I don’t want to do—being slightly paranoid—is monkey about with the contents of the device and end up trashing the already-installed maps, because presumably there’s no way back from that.

Anyone?

I have an 820 using talkytoaster maps. I literally copied the downloaded map into the Garmin folder, disabled the Garmin map on the device and it worked.

I’d assume it’d be the same, dcrainmaker explains it pretty well.

Cool. This sounds like what I’d expect; I’ve followed Ray’s instructions before, but all the mapping-enabled Edge units I’ve had until now have had SD cards, so I’ve always just popped a new card in.

I’ve got some nice custom-styled mapping that I can stick on there. As long as I still have the original maps it’s happy days.

I made a back of the original just in case, but they still seem to be there.

Ioffers’ 1:50k OS Maps will also work just fine.

The who the what now?

– Reliability of auto-resuming recording after a pause. IME Garmins are a nightmare for not bothering to record again once you’ve stopped for food. They seem to cope with short pauses like stopping at the lights, but my big rides generally have huge gaps in them after stops where it’s taken me ages to realise the distance reading isn’t changing.

I think it’s a power saving feature – my 800 beeps after it’s been left for a while, then won’t do the auto resume. It’s really quite annoying!

whats the craic with these other maps.. ive got a 820 and curious now…

Talkietoaster maps exacerbated my Edge Touring’s loss of turn-by-turn problem.  OS maps weren’t great because they were bitmaps.

Yeah, I’ve been a bit ambivalent about the OS maps; good for off-road, I think, but a bit busy for on-road, and they don’t zoom in nicely for sure.

My Openfietsmap maps seemed to route ok. Curious to know what the unit would use for routing if both the Garmin map and the Openfietsmap maps were enabled (maybe it depends on what order they happen to get listed in)… only the former has the popularity routing, of course—which was never a factor on my old devices.

It’s a shame there’s no nice online tool for custom-styling the OFM/Garminified maps (there used to be one, apparently… I think the author just stopped paying the hosting fees or something). I had to buy two really clunky Windows (ugh) applications to customise the mapping: it’s a ridiculously painful process that takes forever and is largely trial-and-error when it comes to working out what you’re actually editing, and it’s not helped by the fact that Mapsource or whatever it is doesn’t actually give an accurate preview of what it’ll look like on the device itself. By the time you get to styling things that you don’t know what they are and can’t find on the map, the “import/guess/edit/export/convert/copy/swap card/restart Edge/pan and zoom for a while” process gets a little tedious 🙂

I think it’s a power saving feature – my 800 beeps after it’s been left for a while, then won’t do the auto resume. It’s really quite annoying!

I guess that would make sense. And yes, my 800 used to do it, as well as two Tourings and a 1000. (Can’t remember if my 200 did or not.) Drives me nuts, anyway. Maybe the workaround is to turn auto-pause off and gradually train myself to habitually use the buttons. Though I’m not sure that’s going to be any more reliable 🙂

Bez long shot that I’ve not tried

The Garmin ConnectIQ Simulator looks to support Edge 820. I wondered if you could test your maps using this

https://developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/programmers-guide/getting-started/

Yeah, I’ve been a bit ambivalent about the OS maps; good for off-road, I think, but a bit busy for on-road, and they don’t zoom in nicely for sure.

You have a touring plus though, I only have a touring normal – so guessing you have a much bigger screen which probably helps.

I dunno why you’d use auto-pause.  Strava gives you both figures when you upload anyway. It’s turned off on mine, I got fed up with bleep bleep all the time at lights.

Auto pause saves battery

You have a touring plus though, I only have a touring normal – so guessing you have a much bigger screen which probably helps.

They’re virtually the same; the Plus has a barometric altimeter and a thermometer but that’s about it.

I dunno why you’d use auto-pause. Strava gives you both figures when you upload anyway. It’s turned off on mine, I got fed up with bleep bleep all the time at lights.

I use it so that the average speed reading gives me my moving average rather than the overall average. (My old eTrexes used to be able to display both; the Edges for some reason have never supported this.) I don’t upload rides so that’s not a concern. And yes, the auto pause beeping is stupid and irritating. It would be nice if Garmin offered the choice to have tones on for navigation alerts but off for everything else, but since when did Garmin give a fig for letting users do things their way?

First impressions of the Explore, then:

Seems generally nice enough. Aesthetically one of the better units out there; ergonomically I’m not convinced by the button positioning on the bottom edge, I’d prefer them on the sides of the device, but it’s a minor thing.

A few odd things around mapping: if you enable relief shading, it’s all in green, which makes half the roads practically invisible, so that’s useless; and why is it that even if you turn off all the labels in the map detail options, you still get labels for a load of useless stuff like railways and streams and occasional villages? Madness. Still, just the usual Garmin foibles. I don’t think they really understand that when you’re riding you want to be able to glance quickly at their low-contrast screen, without relying on the battery-munching light, and actually see things at a glance. I’ll get my high-contrast maps on there at some point. At least they’ve long abandoned the awful typography of the Edge 500/800 days.

It’s noticeably faster than previous devices I’ve had: panning and zooming the map is much quicker, and route calculation takes way less time. That said, Garmin were perhaps a little over-confident with it: you no longer get a progress report for route calculation, just a beepy jingle (yay, another one) when it’s done. Trying out a few ~50km routes, this was fine, it only took a couple of seconds or so; but a 200km route did take somewhat longer. Not sure what happens if you try to start navigating before the jingle. (Also, Garmin please note: relying on beepy jingles for interaction is no use if you’re deaf or have the tones disabled…)

I’ve put Routecourse (IQ app) and Mapfield (IQ data field) on there. They work ok; I was feeling good enough about them to pay for a perpetual Premium licence, anyway. With Routecourse I have no need for the USB cable except for charging.

I had it running on battery saver mode for the 40 minute drive to work this morning and the battery went from 18% to 15%. Blimey. I’m quite comfortable with the screen going blank when I don’t need it, so if that extrapolates out linearly then I’ll be mightily pleased. We shall see…

Brief update. I’ve played with this for the last three days of commuting: once in the van, once a mix of bike and train, and once by bike. Some points to note below. (I’ll write up a detailed review in due course.)

– I got the progress message back for route calculation. Turns out there’s an apparently unrelated setting in the menus which happens to enable this (and at least one other feature which wasn’t at all obvious).

– Routecourse has been a little temperamental on this device: it gets confused as to which routes are downloaded and which aren’t. Seems to mostly behave again when you clean out the courses list. Wasn’t an issue I had on the Edge 1000.

– A couple of (minor) things have changed with regard to navigation, compared to previous devices. I’m still getting used to them.

– I’ve started using auto-start, which I think will solve my niggle about resuming after lengthy stops, though I’ve yet to test it properly.

– And the big one: battery life. There are multiple features worth mentioning in respect of this, but for now I’ll just say… this certainly isn’t following my previous experience of Garmins.

More later, if anyone gives a flip 🙂

How does it compare to the Edge Touring? As in, is it worth an upgrade?  It seems to be, based on their website.  Routing weighted for popularity could really help.

Are the maps Europe-wide?

Depends what you perceive as the weaknesses in the Touring or the worthwhile additions in the Explore, I guess.

Personally I just got a bit fed up with having to dig out a mini USB cable and hook it up when I wanted to get a route on there. It feels like we’re at a point in time when I should be able to just build my route on RWGPS and have it appear on my bike. And, to be fair, that’s where we are—although the implementation isn’t perfect, it works.

So, there’s that. Obviously not everyone wants to use RWGPS and so you’ll need to make sure there’s a Connect IQ app to do what you want. (Or you can download from your tool of choice and then import into Garmin Connect on the web, but that’s something you can only really do on a desktop machine and when I tried it Connect rejected both the .fit and .tcx files from RWGPS and only worked with the .gpx, which has less data in it, eg no cue sheet.) If Garmin were to offer Connect integration with online planners like RWGPS they’d have had more of my money years ago, but Garmin like living in the past so they still tie you in to their ecosystem—which, as far as I can see, doesn’t even have a route planner. Hopeless.

Anyway…

Other advantages over the Touring? Bigger screen. Better touchscreen, at least going on evidence so far (it’s not Thick Glove Season just yet), but even if it isn’t then it’s compatible with the Edge Remote. Text/call alerts. Takes a USB connector that’s still widely used. Battery save mode and auto suspend are worth having for those big days out.

Maps are Europe-wide, yes, as with the Touring. Not sure how much of a benefit popularity routing is; given that I tend to plan a route and then follow that, it’s not really a factor. I did idly play with getting the route to generate some circular routes from home and some A-to-B routes that I know my preferred routes for, just to see what it came up with. Seemed ok, not amazing but ok. I think with auto-generated routes I’d turn automatic route recaulculation on and take ad hoc diversions, so it’d make a good rough guide rather than something to follow to the letter, but to be honest it’s not normally a feature I’d use; maybe on holiday I’d consider it.

(Hmm, my battery has gone up by 3% while it’s been switched off, apparently. Definitely going to need to do a proper test of battery life…)

Disadvantages? No SD card slot, if you’re paranoid like me and prefer to physically swap map cards rather than entrust them to Garmin’s firmware for safekeeping. A bit longer, which might be an issue on shorter stems than mine.

At £198 after discount, and with Tourings going for £80 or so, you’re looking at around £120 to upgrade. I still think the Touring is probably the best value for money out there, largely because they can be had so cheaply and there’s nothing massively bad about them, but—given that I’ve yet to encounter anything I really can’t put up with—I think if you want the best device for navigation and (understandably) feel the 1030 is way too expensive, this is probably The One right now.

>has anyone sideloaded new maps …is monkey about with the contents of the device and end up trashing the already-installed maps, because presumably there’s no way back from that.

There’s loads of room on the device, so you dont need to remove the existing ones (which only get replaced when you refresh in the tool anyway).  Just put on new maps along side the existing ones and turn off the ones you dont want to use.

Of course if you really want to meddle then the alternative firmware works fine.  I’m using hand rolled 4 zoom level yahoo+yahoo+OS50+OS25.

My concern wasn’t so much storage space, more about whether the firmware would throw a tantrum 🙂

Of course if you really want to meddle then the alternative firmware works fine. I’m using hand rolled 4 zoom level yahoo+yahoo+OS50+OS25.

Alternative firmware? Tell me more… (not that I’m likely to try it anytime soon, but I’m curious).

And what are you using to build maps? I forget what tools I was using (TypWiz was one), I’ll have to blow the dust off my Windows machine…

Edit: ah yes, JaVaWa was the other main one.

>Alternative firmware? Tell me more…

Have a read of http://whiter.brinkster.net/en/JNX.shtml

Essentially its a reverse engineering of the birdeye format.