Originally Posted by
BearSquirrel
Longer term, I'm disappointed by the Rox 9.0. I really wished I had gone for the Garmin 305.
On the hardware side, the battery life IS excellent. However, I plug the Rox into my computer so often that I'm not sure it matters.
The mount on the cadence is pretty lousy. I've snapped two of them. Luckily, they snapped where I could find them.
The computer itself looses contact with it's mount far too often. The best cure I've found so far is saliva. The main button on the computer itself is finicky. It's often hard to get waypoints to register. The paint on the button itself and the heartrate strap is peeling off.
The new software has nice long term tracking features. But data importation is still cludgy. And there are still serious issues with consistency between logs and trips. The new axis on the software has a fixed altitude. So if you ride in somewhere "non-mountainous" your hill climbs will barely register. And the whole graphing feature becomes useless.
Vs. Garmin where there are options for tracking runs as well as cycling, Sigma comes up empty. When one invests a lot of money into a computer system, you want options and there are none on the Sigma side.
It's still a good computer. There are some issues that Sigma is not working out. I'm inclined to switch to Garmin.
Since the ROX 9.0 has been on the market, Garmin has come out with the Edge 500 and now the Edge 800. Sigma has only updated the software and come out with another color. Not much in this competitive market.
I strongly agree with two of your points: the silver finish on the heart rate strap and computer wears off over time and the new software altitude axis always starts at zero. Imagine if this were done with the Dow Jones Average graph--100 point swings would look like mere blips.
The computer does become loose after repeated removals from the mount. To fix this I just put a piece of electrical tape on the back. My cadence sensor mount and magnet work well, but I frequently need to reset the computer in its mount to make both cadence and heart rate pickup.
In Sigma's defense, when I last rode in the mountains with my group, a Garmin user called out the incline during a moderate climb. His instantaneous numbers were much higher than my steady, more believable ROX 9.0 display. I still believe that the computer display data along with trip data are averaged over a longer period than the 5 second logbook data I record. This may account for minor differences in max incline, speed, and total distance.
All in all, I still enjoy having the device and look forward to another software update.