Originally Posted by
europa
Thanks for the replies to my questions and comments.
Any thoughts on which is the preferred unit to buy? There are a lot of comments regarding one or the other, but is anyone game enough to express a preference? Indeed, does it matter?
I bought a refurbished Edge 800 (new case, new battery, Garmin warranty) after returning an Edge 810 and ELEMNT which had problems I couldn't work around.
It generates turn-by-turn regardless of what's in the course file, crashes based on distance not road configuration (which can be worked around with course splits and joining recordings with fitfiletools.com), has maps with street names that pan when zoomed in, switches to the map screen before turns with path highlighted, has good battery life, has programmable per-bike odometers, charges while riding, and has the USB connector parallel to the ground so charging cables don't fall out due to their own weight.
I skipped the 1000 because people had problems with extremely short battery life, and the software is more complicated than the other GPSes which will lead to more problems given Garmin's incompetence surrounding software development.
The $100 lower price wasn't a factor - I'd have paid $100 more than the others to have a GPS which worked for me.
I briefly considered building a bike computer which ran things in different processes for separate failure domains and used an e-ink display for great legibility in sunlight and good battery life, but have more fun writing software for my day job than I would doing that project.