Originally Posted by
chaadster
I have a similar impression to Looigi's, namely that Garmin GPS units cannot compete with smartphones around the services and features you're talking about. The smartphones (and my experience is iPhone, btw) are simply easier to use, more versatile, more graphical, and offer more features. Apps like Motion X GPS Drive not only provide tracking and turn-by-turn navigation, but also put destination searches just two or three finger-taps away, so that if you wanted to find a bank, a campsite, a wifi hotspot, or a point-of-interest, you could literally do the search, call them, and navigate there in 5 taps, without typing anything.
Garmins, like the 500 I now use (after trying and finding wanting the 800), as Loogi said, are great for doing those things you, the OP, don't actually need one to do! I do like the ride data, and while I could capture that on my phone with Strava or something similar, I also like the low risk of keeping a durable GPS unit on my bars rather than an overly large, expensive, and comparatively delicate cell phone.
Only thing I'd add here is it's important not to use the 500 as your benchmark for what Edge computers can do. The 500 was Garmin's first attempt at a device for those who didn't want to shell out the bucks for the top-of-the-line model and just wanted to track their rides and metrics. Thus, the 500 doesn't have a lot of the user-directed navigation functionality as the 705, 800 and 810; it can just tell you where you've been along with your metrics.