I think I’ve reached the end of the line with navigating off my Suunto watch.

My priority hear is navigation

Can you follow a gpx file well off road?

Can you change the route off road mid ride?

Can you get more than 12 hours out of it. I will have one very long day out next year. I’m thinking no sensors and charging at meal brakes

Should i get something else?

Thanks John

There was a thread started by Bez in April

Any Hammerhead Karoo users?

This is what I thought about it when I used it

• 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.

Thanks Nick. I’d forgotten that thread. I might just have to try it and return it if it drives me nuts

I do use strava and I’m quite keen not to have to use blue tooth to my phone

Can you tell the device not to navigate and just to show you where you are on the map?

Yes I seem to remember it would do that pretty well. I think it uses open street map as a base, which is normally pretty good with well known FP and BW. Go off piste though and like pretty much every other nav tool I’ve ever use just goes blank.

It did have a major hissy fit when I rode along a single-track path that was very close to/next to a road, it really (really) wanted me to be on the road, and keep on beeping at me about it. I’m pretty sure I could’ve worked out how to turn it’s bleeper off, but I let it work its self into a froth as an experiment to see what it would do.

In many ways it looks like a nice device, but I’m put off by the fact that it’s using Android 8, a version from 2017. There’s nothing much wrong with Android 8, but I worry about their design philosophy if they think that shipping something that the customer might expect to last many years based on an obsolete OS is ok.

I’ve had one since January and am still very happy with it, which makes it a lot better than my last three GPSs!

Pretty sure it won’t do 12 hours straight, but it does charge pretty quickly so if you have a power bank that can put out a decent power I suspect meal break top-ups would be sufficient.

Following a GPX route off-road works well, but I usually turn off the navigation bleeps when doing so. As with all devices, you’re at the mercy of the underlying mapping which may or may not know about the trails you’re trying to ride or understand the junctions between them. But the screen is very good, so it’s very easy to follow just by glancing at it occasionally.

Not sure what you mean by changing route mid-ride. If you mean, can you swap to a different pre-planned route then “yes”. If you mean, can you alter the route via the device on the fly then “yes”, it’s possible to change the destination, but it’s unlikely to plan a good off-road route for you because of the above.

If you go off route, it will re-route you back onto your planned route, something which I’ve found works extremely well on-road. I’ve not ever tried or relied on it off road.

I’ve found that the software updates over the last 12 months have all been good, with lots of good new features, and most of the minor niggles I had with it being addressed. One thing that I do really like about the Karoo is that all the core functionality can be accessed with hardware buttons as well as via the screen, making it usable in the rain and with gloves. There was another significant update yesterday which looks like it’s addressed the one thing that I’ve been annoyed with not being able to do via hardware (adjusting screen brightness).

As for the dashboard stuff, I’m very happy with the way that Hammerhead do this, and I’m glad they haven’t wasted time reimplementing stuff that 3rd parties like Strava already do better.

Have you thought about a lezyne mega? I’ve got an XL version and it will last easily over 12 hours even when navigating. I like the mapping, it’s not massively detailed but I’ve done 3 routes of over 100 miles that I’d never ridden and plotted on my laptop and I didn’t go wrong at all. That was off road 80% of the routes. I think you can get a colour screen version.

The Karoo 2 is talked about in this podcast.

Chris Froome and Hammerhead CEO Pieter Morgan

Not sure what you mean by changing route mid-ride. If you mean, can you swap to a different pre-planned route then “yes”. If you mean, can you alter the route via the device on the fly then “yes”, it’s possible to change the destination, but it’s unlikely to plan a good off-road route for you because of the above.

Yes good question

I think what you’ve answered the question. The situation we had last summer was that we wanted to cut a corner. Actually I had the gpx for the route with short cut. But say I hadn’t. I think I could stop following the route. Make a new route until we rejoin the old one later. Follow this then swap back to the original

I’ll look at the Lezyne XL too

and I’m glad they haven’t wasted time reimplementing stuff that 3rd parties like Strava already do better.

Yes I get that completely, It makes sense and I think that Karoo wanted to put all their effort into making a decent head unit, which I think they’ve achieved. All of my stuff being on Garmin (watch and Nav computer) and not signed up to Strava is perhaps a somewhat unique situation, I accept, but still frustrating nevertheless, if their own ecosystem had been just a little better, they may have persuaded me to keep it, I still maintain that for the money they want, they could have made a bit more of an effort.

I had a Karoo 1 and now have a Karoo 2, I also use a Garmin Edge (and occasionally ride with both).

Positives
Map is clearer than the Edge, and Navigation of a loaded GPX file is easy – Just import to the dashboard and it will sync to the Karoo.
If you try and edit it, you can hit problems where Bridleways/Paths don’t quite join a road. The baseman for the Karoo though is based on OpenStreetMap, so the one thing you can do is edit the base map – Just get yourself an open street Map account and you can join/edit/add tracks that you find missing – takes a while for it to roll into the Hammerhead dashboard though.
You can side load apps, so you can have OSMaps loaded onto your Karoo.

Negatives
The big negative for me was raised above about the lack of training Data viewing available in the dashboard or on the Karoo, and the answer is always just use Strava.

So I tend to stick with my Garmin for the training side of things (I also have a Garmin watch that I run with, and the Garmin Ecosystem can combine my efforts across a watch and an edge), but if I am off on a ride I need to navigate then the Karoo comes along and I just use that for the maps (and as a backup for the edge)

I’m a long-term Karoo user; first with a Karoo 1 and now one of the first batches of Karoo 2 that were released. I do like it a lot for navigation. It’s streets ahead (!) of the Garmins I had previously. The mapping and navigation is fast enough to re-route quickly should you go off-route, whereas other computers I have experience of really struggle with this, especially off-road. It will generate a re-route in a few seconds, complete with elevation profile even for the re-routed part. And the clarity of the screen is great for seeing the trails / roads ahead.

I think what you’ve answered the question. The situation we had last summer was that we wanted to cut a corner. Actually I had the gpx for the route with short cut. But say I hadn’t. I think I could stop following the route. Make a new route until we rejoin the old one later. Follow this then swap back to the original

This is straightforward to do. Zoom out and long-press on the point you want to go to. This can be on your original route or anywhere else you want to go. The Karoo will generate a route to get there. One caveat: at present you cannot select on- or off-road routing for this on-the-fly routing function. In my experience it will try to use roads as much as possible but will follow an off-road route if there’s no other option. As above, if the route it generates is not the one you want, you can ignore its instructions and it will re-route. You can clear the on-the-fly routing at any time and it will direct you back to the original route.

What’s missing – the training functions are still basic especially compared to Garmin. There’s no recovery advisor, VO2 max, suggested workouts, or anything like that. You can set it up to do intervals but that’s about it at present.

Other stuff I like – the Climber implementation is good. Shows a list of climbs, you can see the profile and details of each. As you approach each climb you get a pop-up. Like CLimbPro on the Garmins but more info and clearer. Strava live segments is well presented. Routes can be synced with RideWithGPS, Strava, etc so all you need to do is pin or star the route, do a sync on the Hammerhead website and hey-presto, your routes are on the device. Even routes others have built. Some nice presentation of heart rate and power zones.

Would there be interest in an Android app that showed an OS map, let you overlay a GPX on it and measured heart rate as you went? – Would this app with a cheap second hand phone mounted on bar be useful? or has it all been done well by someone else?