Originally Posted by
Metaluna
I've had my ELEMNT for a few weeks now. Overall I like it a lot. The only major flaw for me is that the % grade/VAM function is, frankly, garbage and barely works most of the time. The altimeter seems to get the total ascent/descent numbers right most of the time, but when I'm doing a significant climb the grade often drops out to zero, and seems to stick hard at zero even when I'm in a shallow climb (say 1-3%) for several minutes. I've heard several other complaints about this so I don't think I have a defective unit. I've never been totally happy with the altimeters on the various Garmins I've owned, but this is another league of badness. Supposedly the Bolt has the same chips under the hood so I wonder if it does any better.
Battery life is decent. I estimate I'm getting about 10-12 hours with speed/cadence/HRM sensors, and turn-by-turn routing all active, and using the map display most of the time (so there's a lot of screen redrawing). The ELEMNT phone app, which needs to be running to get phone notifications and Bluetooth syncing (I think), seems to suck power though, and is dog slow in general when just scrolling through the displays (iPhone 6s).
Does anyone know what the behavior is when the Elemnt loses GPS track? Yesterday I was riding along on a rural road, clearly on the correct TBT route with no turns anywhere nearby, when suddenly the Elemnt started flashing the off-course warning at me (red LEDs flashing across the top). After a minute or so it went back to normal. I noticed I was under heavy tree cover so I'm theorizing it lost the GPS fix, but since there's no satellite page I couldn't get any read on the number and signal strength of the SVs it was seeing. I think there's a data field you can put up that is the estimated GPS accuracy but I didn't have it configured on any of my data screens at the time.
Boy, I could have written this. Nice summary.
I like the ELEMNT a lot more than my Edge 1000 but the grade measurement stinks. At least the Garmin number is perceived as being better since it changes faster - I don't know if it is more accurate. The ELEMNT seems to have issues below 1% grade. I previously thought it was just fine on a long grade where it could settle in until yesterday when I was on a climb that was probably about 3-4% for 1/3rd of a mile, and it read zero the whole time. Under 1% grade, it seems to be more insensitive than it should be. I rarely see less than 0.7% and it seems to go from 0% (and you can feel you're going up) and then usually it will go to 1.3% or so with occasionally displaying 0.7% briefly - hardly ever lower.
More concerning, I have a page where I show the grade alongside the ascent distance. The ascent number was climbing but the grade wasn't changing. I even was interested to see that it I had climbed more than 13' (roughly the precision of the GPS) over a known distance that was relatively short, and the grade number never changed. That should have been easily within the accuracy of the barometric sensor.
I have noticed that over the last three software revision, the grade number seems to have gone from twitchy, to more stable, to dead slow/inaccurate. So I think they must be working on it, but they have a lot more work to do. Either that or they need to explain why their number is what it is and why Garmin's number is wrong.
They need to figure this out and probably use some combination of both GPS and barometric data with some sort of adaptive sampling to get it right.
I don't have the problem with the smartphone app on an iPhone 7. It seems as responsive as any other app and meets expectations.
I have had the GPS lose the track and flash the LEDs in thick tree cover. That said, it still showed me on the route and it didn't lose the plot - it just complained.