Garmin has announced two new additions to its cycling computer lineup – the Edge 530 and the Edge 830. As you'd expect, both devices keep track of the basics – speed, time, distance, and elevation, along with heart rate and power when paired to compatible devices, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. The navigation capabilities have increased, and they now come pre-loaded with
Trailforks data for trails around the world, including difficulty level.
The overall size is similar to the Edge 520 and 820, but the display is now 13% larger. The battery life is a claimed 20 hours, and the devices are compatible with Garmin's Charge power pack, which can bump that up to 44 hours for those ultra-long epics.
Edge 530 & 830 Details• Pre-loaded with trail data from Trailforks
• Touchscreen route planning on 830
• Measures jump count, distance, hang time
• Heart rate, power connectivity
• 20 hours of battery life
• ANT+, Bluetooth, wi-fi connectivity
• Size: 50 mm x 82 mm x 20 mm
• MSRP: Edge 530: $299.99 / Edge 830: $399.99
•
www.garmin.com The list of features between the two computers is almost identical, but the 830 has a touch screen, which allows for on-device route planning. The 530 is priced at $299.99 USD for the unit alone, and the 830 is $399.99.
There are several training tools built into the computers, including the ability to sync workouts from Garmin Connect or Training Peaks in order to see what to expect in the week ahead. They can also be configured to send alerts when it's time time to rehydrate or refuel, a feature that could be useful for races or tough training sessions where it's hard enough to keep turning the pedals, let alone remember to take a drink of water.
Have you ever been on a climb that feels like it'll never end? The 830 and 530 both include a new feature called 'ClimbPro' that displays the grade and ascent remaining on a route or course, so you'll know exactly how much more suffering lies ahead. When it does come time to head downhill, the devices can keep track of metrics like jump count, jump distance, and hang time. They'll also display a Grit score at the end of a ride, which is calculated by using GPS, elevation, and accelerometer data, and a Flow score, which is supposed to measure how smoothly a rider descends a trail.
A new bike alarm feature has been added that will send an alert to your cellphone if your bike is moved, perfect for those times when you're craving a donut but didn't bring a bike lock, along with a 'Find My Edge' option in case an unplanned tumble sends it flying off into the woods somewhere.
It's also possible to add apps like Accuweather, Yelp, Strava Summit, or Komooot to the device from Garmin's Connect IQ store.
you cant update many of the mapping and navigation apps on my iphone4 which IMHO has the best form factor of any phone created.
Which will force you to use your daiky phone for mapping and that drains the battery quite fast.
Garmin however is not the solution, hammerhead is almost there, but the price is obscene...
In addition, for those of us that spend a significant amount of time working from our phones usually are sensitive to battery usage. Also I don't want to ride with my phone mounted on my bars for a variety of reasons due to size, cost, etc, but I do want to see my statistics while I ride. For those talking about touchscreens, they suck on cycling computers especially while riding with gloves. That is why they removed the functionality between the 510 and 520.
Last piece is that if there were a way to make these devices for less money with the same functionality it would have been done. Plenty of competitors out there like Wahoo that are competing and make great products. Even though these companies are trying to gain marketshare they still are similarly priced. There are $75 computers out there, they just don't use GPS, support power meters, rely on wheel sensors, etc.
Pair that with a watch based GPS system(amazfit Stratos) i have a solid system that works for me very nicely. in both my hometrails and in the remote backcountry.
A 23000mah battery pack is always in my backpack out in the bush.
As I said GARMIN is never the answer. as their software is way out of touch and instead of firmware updates, they just release a new model every year. NEVER is my answer for them.
Nonsense. The recording interval is determined by application settings and has nothing to do with the actual GPS chip.
Not to mention a $150 Android phone will have a brand new battery, the latest GPS chip, and will be 10 times more powerful than these dumb devices from Garmin. Many people have already switched over to cheap Android phones because Garmin sells simply overpriced outdated crap.
https://www.pinkbike.com/photo/17033182/
I think there's an (hidden) option to download Trailforks as a vector KLM per country basis, that in conjunction with Openandromaps (for base map with countour lines) and Oruxmaps (best free GPS android app) would really be perfect, but never got an answer on how to download it.
www.singletracks.com/blog/gps/gps-distance-accuracy-test-smartphone-apps-vs-dedicated-gps
Still tho, I can buy an android phone with a flagship Qualcomm processor/antenna SOC for under $400 with a bigger, infinitely better screen, or a smartwatch with a more expensive chip and better screen for under $200. There is something fishy about the Garmin pricing.
yeah, that's why I use a freaking $200 Android phone with Locus and all the necessary offline vector maps.
It has a lot of more features and better screen & performance than these $400 toys from Garmin.
I get 30+ hours of tracking per battery charge. That's a lot more than I need.
Additionnally those android phones have a hard time lasting a day with regular phone use. When I am in he middle of nowhere in the mountains I prefer keeping the battery of my phone plenty enough in case of emergency.
I have written interpolation algorithms for gps traces and believe the iphone 6s and later make the best data.
I have also had issues with accuracy once a phone drops off the network and has to rely on GPS only. The phones are capable of being very accurate, but they are not designed to leverage the HW for this specific purpose. Phones may or may not have access to GLONASS systems and many only use the US systems and not European or Russian satellites. See the following image that shows real GPS waypoints on a very simple 1/4 mile track that allows for use of the cellular network
images.singletracks.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/gps_test_aggregate.jpg
You can see how rough the iPhone waypoints are vs the other GPS dedicated devices.
For everyone stating you can buy a new Android phone for $150/$50/etc that is with a contract that locks you in to a payment stream of 36 months. Try and buy the phone without getting a contract and see what the price is.
At a high level if you already have a cell phone and want to run Strava/GarminConnect/etc it is good enough as long as you are not too far from a network. If you want more accuracy, care about battery life for reasons other than the ride, use Ant+ sensors or ride in areas where cell coverage is less than stable, a Garmin or other device is a better option.
www.singletracks.com/blog/gps/gps-distance-accuracy-test-smartphone-apps-vs-dedicated-gps
THe biggest issue is when you upload to various services, they mutate your data. Its not just about polling frequency or exact accuracy per reading. Its a lot more complex than that
www.aliexpress.com/item/In-Stock-Global-Version-Xiaomi-Redmi-Note-7-6-3-Full-Screen-Snapdragon-660-AIE-4GB/32891010865.html
The point is the used smartphone market is booming. Most people I know now buy used phones (except my fellow develoepers; when you make your income off of a device you can justify owning the latest and greatest) now, and most don't pay more than $300.
I use a Spigen Rugged Armor case and a protective glass/foil for the screen. 4 years and counting.
@salespunk: Activity profiles take care of any drift - for biking, I use a minimum interval of 10 meters and 5 seconds between two trackpoints. The resulting tracks are pretty much the same as those logged by buddy's Garmin. Sometimes even more accurate.
Not to mention that the comparison in your article is absolutely irrelevant for mountain biking - you don't ride 250m laps, do you? A trackpoint 3 meters off on a 40km ride is absolutely irrelevant.
A 5 second interval is an incredibly inaccurate and would suggest that you only want basic time and distance without regard to small interval accuracy for applications like Strava. With that recording interval any of your leaderboard numbers are merely suggestions. I understand that you may not care about things like that, other people do.
Strava as an example absolutely does not correct drift in the manner you are saying. I have seen specific examples of friends riding with me where their track shows them riding in 40' circles on a singletrack multiple times while using an iPhone to record.
Again I go back to the fact that a phone may be fine for your use case. Awesome, but that does not mean it is the best way to record a ride for everyone or the most accurate. Accurate enough for some people is not accurate enough for everyone. That is why there are also devices like LitPro that are even more accurate than a Garmin and provide NO screen or even basic functionality other than position.
The only thing it compares is the logging frequency that various apps or devices use. I could set my logging frequency to every second and get a 5MB file for each of my ride. But I don't freaking need it!
Neither do I care about Strava or any leaderboards. I ride because I enjoy riding, and I want to keep track of the distance and elevation I climb, my heart-rate etc.
A waypoint every 10 meters and 5 seconds is as much as I want to have logged. Anything more is just a waste of storage space and battery for me.
You are confusing GPS accuracy with logging frequency.
Newer article. Similarly flawed as theyre round tripping through strava and linear interpolating between points.
What i see is that the raw data from the latest iphones (specifically the 6s and later) are simply better than the cyclecomputers. Interesting is that speed info from gps is more accurate than location, so is often best to bias location using speed.
I consider the strava round trip a huge benefit for common trails, they can average thousands of traces to pretty closly approximate the truth, then snap a rider onto the path.
Maybe the last 20 traces ive investigated, 100% have been from cyclecomputer gps just going haywire. I strongly suspect garmin specifically has childishly broken interpolation that is corrupting the data i see.
Changed to Wahoo to give it a chance and it let me down 3 times on races (I think it's a problem with the altimeter hole/sensor). It died with "low bat". You had to warm it up, give a little bit of carge and it would show up 80% again. lol
People praise Wahoo a lot but it doesnt even have a basic alarm/alert or a battery charging percentage, you have to turn it on (it takes ages). Navigation is a joke.
So I bought a 520+ and I'm happy. Did a 5 hour ride, 67% of battery. Still, I must say the Wahoo interaction with the phone app was superb!
Garmin is not even close to perfection, like Wahoo, but people just bash it for fun. On the other hand the Wahoo crowd is simply out of control, don't even try to point a fault, you'll get beaten.
The battery is getting a bit tired but a replacement is on its way for a mere $25. It's simple, turn it on, ride your bike, turn it off. It gives me all the info I'm looking for and records my data accurately. I'm not interested in strapping a big, ugly and expensive phone with too many things going on into my stem. I have to agree that I have no interest in having a touch screen, thankfully mine just has buttons.
Yes these are expensive, but they serve a function. Worth the money
I personally find the navigation functions of the current 520 using downloaded Trailforks maps to be awesome if you pre-plan a route with the Trailforks ride planner. Makes following a route very very easy, never get lost. Still doesn't compare to Trailforks on my phone when trying to navigate through unfamiliar trail systems when not using a pre-planned route. The Garmin is not easy to use this way, but pre-planned route navigation is pretty much the only thing I use it for and is worth the money just for that.
The maps are different though, the TF trail data on this new Garmin should be routable on the device, where as the downloadable trail maps on the TF website are not.
Instead of a firmware update on the 520 for a simple feature add on, they rather suck new people who don't already have been down the Garmin blackhole of disappointment..
Here's what would make me upgrade and buy more Garmin stuff: integration with their Inreach Mini.
The Inreach Mini is their satellite tracker/communicator. You can send text messages and stuff when you're out of cell range.
The 520 Plus does a great job integrating with Strava's Beacon via your cellphone, so when I start a ride, my wife gets a text with a link to follow my ride, and assumedly come get me if I'm out cold by the side of the trail for a few hours.
Great for her piece of mind, and mine when I'm out on solo rides. So long as I'm in cell range.
You'd think that if you had a Garmin™ bike computer and a Garmin™ satellite communicator, they might be able to talk to each other. So that if I was out of cell range, the Beacon/Livetrack could hand off to the Inreach, and keep updating the outside world on my location.
Stupidly, they don't. The Inreach uses a completely separate tracking system, and while it'll talk to some of the Garmin watches, it won't talk to any of Garmin's bike computers. I can't think of a user group to whom this would be more valuable to than mountain bikers, and DC Rainmaker even brought it up to Garmin's engineers when he reviewed the Inreach Mini a full year ago.
This was their reply:
"For its part, in my discussions with Garmin about this – they get it. They completely agree the use case for getting this in Edge devices is huge, especially in the mountain biking community."
So, Garmin knows this is a big miss on their part, has known for a year, and has done nothing to address it.
That's pretty emblamatic of Garmin in my experience.
The solo rides I go on outside of cell range tend to be the rides where sharing my location with someone would be the most beneficial. But I can't bring myself to spend more money on a device to do this, when Garmin can't be bothered to deliver an integrated ecosystem that actually meets the needs of mountain bikers.
Sadly, there's no real competitors in the space that offer anything like this. The Spot satellite trackers are the only close competitor, and they're pretty poorly reviewed.
Recently however, I started noticing that the B&W screen sucks big time when it comes to maps, especially for trail riding. Live tracking requires the companion app to be open manually on the phone (annoying) and incident detection feature is not available on Bolt (even tho it was 90% false postives for me it saved my ass once).
I'll be watching what people say about 530 and might get back to Garminland, unless Wahoo releases their teased Roam or whatever the next device is going to be with Trailforks support.
I’m going for a road ride.
What’s made me a convert? Wahoo just WORKS. No weird glitches uploading rides, no turn off Bluetooth/turn it back on, great form factor, simple UI, and I do like having the LEDs set up with my HR zones as a reminder (especially during enduros) that I’m going too hard on a long climb. Changing those settings in the Wahoo app is SO much easier.
My Fenix syncs quite well and just doesn’t seem to have the glitches and hiccups of the Edge series—except the 130, which has been super reliable. I think Wahoo just nails it in terms of features vs reliability.
I do like the gimmicky jumping metrics and things like that but I wouldn’t go back to the Garmin platform and interface just for that.
They're offering to replace my 510 for 20% off MSRP. Thanks for the attempt, but that's still more expensive than buying it retail.
I simply added my Iphone 5 to my shared data plan, bought a Topeak stem mount and protective case for $40. Downloaded Trailforks with proper touchscreen this time downloaded a bike computer app to get data from my rides ( i only wish one day Trailforks would integrate that to their app) and bam i got a way better setup than that crappy Garmin. Oh! And for those complaining about battery life, $40 and got a new battery which last me a full day ride...
www.dcrainmaker.com/2018/02/hammerhead-karoo-cycling-gps-in-depth-review.html
ill take solid execution over feature count.
I can buy almost 3 usable phones for the price of the more expensive Garmin.
I crash all the time, and I've never destroyed my phone.
I bought a few Garmin devices before ( watch and computer ) and they're by far the worst spent money ever - shite devices are shite