I thought I'd bite the bullet and try this Wahoo lark (replacing a Garmin 800). It's decent but there are certainly plus and minus points over the Garmin.
The connectivity is great, doing some routes on Ride with GPS and just syncing them direct to the Elemnt was much nicer than faffing around with downloading to a PC, plugging in the Garmin, copying over, trying to work out the random name, etc.
Similarly, getting home, ending the ride and finding the ride is automatically on Ridewith GPS/Strava was nice.
Actual riding with it navigating was OK. It seems not all Ride with GPS routes have cues so you do end up just following a line sometimes, the Elemnt doesn't warn you about this (the phone app does).
Routes with cues were pretty decent. It sometimes got confused and would keep Turn Right or Turn Left on the screen for a bit of time after the turn.
The black and white screen definitely isn't as easy to use as a colour Garmin one. Trying to pick out paths, rivers, etc is pretty awkward although it's fine for just on the road. Overall it was fairly easy to follow though.
The bit where it was really poor was trying to find a route if you weren't on it. I was maybe 500 yards from the route but zooming out on the Elemnt you can't see where the route is (due to it being black on black) and you can't pan around at a zoomed in level. I found myself having to resort to RWGPS app and google maps on my phone to get nearer the route and it was still a bit shonky about showing up on the Elemnt until I was riding on it. This was a bit painful and wouldn't have happened on the Garmin where you'd zoom out, get a nice coloured line and cycle in that direction until you hit the route (and pan and zoom if you wanted to look in more detail).
The other big problem is the bluetooth connection to the phone. It seems to drop out a lot. Trying to do an ad-hoc route was a ballache because it'd constantly disconnect and then be searching and then disconnect again. Need to test it a bit more but if this continues it could be a deal breaker and end with me returning it.
The other big issue is that it's pretty limited offline with attempting to navigate to an ad-hoc destination whilst your phone doesn't have any network connection basically impossible. This seems quite a flaw. OSMAND can generate a route and a gpx file whilst offline so I was hoping that the Elemnt app would be able to import this whilst offline. However, it appears that the app can't import if it is not connected to the internet (you get a bad gpx error, even though the same gpx works fine if you're online) which is a bit shit.
I thought I'd bite the bullet and try this Wahoo lark (replacing a Garmin 800). It's decent but there are certainly plus and minus points over the Garmin.
The connectivity is great, doing some routes on Ride with GPS and just syncing them direct to the Elemnt was much nicer than faffing around with downloading to a PC, plugging in the Garmin, copying over, trying to work out the random name, etc.
Similarly, getting home, ending the ride and finding the ride is automatically on Ridewith GPS/Strava was nice.
Actual riding with it navigating was OK. It seems not all Ride with GPS routes have cues so you do end up just following a line sometimes, the Elemnt doesn't warn you about this (the phone app does).
Routes with cues were pretty decent. It sometimes got confused and would keep Turn Right or Turn Left on the screen for a bit of time after the turn.
The black and white screen definitely isn't as easy to use as a colour Garmin one. Trying to pick out paths, rivers, etc is pretty awkward although it's fine for just on the road. Overall it was fairly easy to follow though.
The bit where it was really poor was trying to find a route if you weren't on it. I was maybe 500 yards from the route but zooming out on the Elemnt you can't see where the route is (due to it being black on black) and you can't pan around at a zoomed in level. I found myself having to resort to RWGPS app and google maps on my phone to get nearer the route and it was still a bit shonky about showing up on the Elemnt until I was riding on it. This was a bit painful and wouldn't have happened on the Garmin where you'd zoom out, get a nice coloured line and cycle in that direction until you hit the route (and pan and zoom if you wanted to look in more detail).
The other big problem is the bluetooth connection to the phone. It seems to drop out a lot. Trying to do an ad-hoc route was a ballache because it'd constantly disconnect and then be searching and then disconnect again. Need to test it a bit more but if this continues it could be a deal breaker and end with me returning it.
The other big issue is that it's pretty limited offline with attempting to navigate to an ad-hoc destination whilst your phone doesn't have any network connection basically impossible. This seems quite a flaw. OSMAND can generate a route and a gpx file whilst offline so I was hoping that the Elemnt app would be able to import this whilst offline. However, it appears that the app can't import if it is not connected to the internet (you get a bad gpx error, even though the same gpx works fine if you're online) which is a bit shit.