Originally Posted by northerntier

Don't knock what you haven't tried. Burning 75% in 2.5 hours would be with the map on. Turn the map off and you can go all day. Or, buy a $30 battery backup and leave the map on for long rides. Or use a generator hub, which many of us have.

As far as the software, there are many different choices. The bike-specific ones tend not to have maps, though MotionX allows you to pre-cache entire swathes of map, as one poster noted above.

For me, the iphone is the long-term solution, and cost is not a factor. The flexibility, the variety of different apps, the pace at which they are being improved, all leave garmin in the dust. On the other hand, I no longer use cadence or heart rate.

Different strokes.