Marcus_Ti

Some folks were wondering if/when Wahoo might update their line...they added a new top-tier device

https://www.bicycleretailer.com/new-...ew-elemnt-roam

DCRainmaker already has his review posted. Yay for media blackouts:

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2019/05/...th-review.html

jadocs

I saw that, I like it but my bolt already does everything I need so I cant justify it right now. Battery life has to be lower with the auto dim function and color screen.

DrIsotope

They claim it doesn't, because it's in the same size case as the Elemnt, so bigger battery than what's in the Bolt. If I want nav, I've had a Hammerhead Karoo for over a year, and it sometimes works. For an everyday bike computer, the Bolt is the best I've had. If Hammerhead can ever get their software figured out, it's really an unbeatable platform. That said, my Karoo sits in its box, and I use the Bolt every day.

I know for 100% sure that I wouldn't pay the premium for the added nav features on the new Wahoo. The Bolt is still the best buy in their lineup.

jadocs

Agreed, after reading DC's review linked above it appears the ROAM is slower now with regard to its competitors in the navigation department.

Metaluna

The battery life on my ELEMNT has been dropping lately, so it might be time to look at a new unit (or else see if it's possible to have the battery replaced).

I do like a few things about the new ROAM, though at that price point I would also have to look seriously at the Edge 830 and even 1030. For my uses, the seamless cloud integration with RideWithGPS and Strava are killer advantages for the Wahoo though. With Garmin you need a ConnectIO app for that I believe.

JohnJ80

Yep. Ray Maker's review overall pretty much labeled it a miss and overpriced. too bad, I've always liked Wahoo's products and have an Elemnt.

J.

Seattle Forrest

What do you need the app for? You can say Connect up to automatically send your ride data to Strava and other places. Are you pulling from them instead?

Seattle Forrest

Sorry to hear that. I was real interested in the Karoo, but didn't get one. Send like it had a great deal of potential.

JohnJ80

It's a matter of perspective. I have one and it's getting better fast. In the last several months, it's reliability has come way up, it correlates well with my other two bike computers (Edge 1000 and Wahoo Elemnt). Of the three I have, I prefer the Karoo.

J.

JohnJ80

It's for pulling routes down from the other sources (RWGPS, Dynamic.watch) not for sending your data up.

Metaluna

My use model is to import routes from RideWithGPS directly to the Wahoo, then at the end of the ride push the tracks back up to RwGPS as well as Strava. This can be done directly over WiFi or tethered through the Wahoo phone app, with no desktop PC needed. From what I've read, the Garmins can push tracks up, but not pull routes down (except from their own cloud service). My understanding is that the only officially supported method is to export the RwGPS route to a TCX file then copy it to the Garmin via USB. There's a third-party ConnectIQ app called dynamicWatch which I *think* can sort of replicate the use model of the Wahoo but I'm not sure.

njkayaker

There are other IQ apps that let you download routes directly to the Garmin from RWGPS or Garmin Connect. dynamicWatch requires you to go through yet another website.

Marcus_Ti

Problem with relying on ConnectIQ apps...is they're released and are awesome, then Garmin updates the platform which breaks them. And the developer is gone and doesn't update them after a revision or two.

Had it happen to all 5 of my favorite Connect IQ data fields back while I was on Garmin.

njkayaker

There's some risk of that. Of course, that's different than "can't be done".

These apps use the same facility that Garmin itself uses to transfer routes. So, it might be less likely that this would break.

I think there were also some "growing pains" with the IQ SDK, where there were significant changes between versions. I think that might have cooled down a bit (which would mean providing long term support might be easier).

Metaluna

That's exactly what I've been afraid of. I've been close to pulling the trigger on an Edge 1030 a couple of times over the past year, but I would be relying on third-parties to provide me with key features without which I have a hard time justifying the $600. You've just confirmed that the situation with the stability of the ConnectIQ ecosystem is worse than I feared.

Unfortunately given the reported performance issues with the ROAM, I don't have a lot of good options if my ELEMNT battery finally dies and it has been discontinued. Hopefully the issues with the ROAM are just temporary and will be fixed with future updates, rather than something unfixable, such as if they cheaped out and put a seriously underpowered CPU or too little memory in it.

Seattle Forrest

Thanks for clarifying that.

It's been since last year that I've done this. RWGPS gives me better TBT on my Garmin, but you're right, it involves jumping through some hoops. I didn't realize that was so easy with a Wahoo.

I'll look into dynamic watch, thanks for the tip!

Seattle Forrest

Garmin has a lot of really fantastic stuff, including the radar. As readable as their screens are in the sun, they're really low resolution. I know a big part of that is for battery life, but Garmin charges a premium, and it just doesn't feel like a great value for maps with the limited detail it's capable of showing. Karoo has a better screen and it sounded like there was good nav and good visualization of the map data. Bike computers need to move in that direction.

JohnJ80

It sort of seems to me that Garmin is adding features that are largely computation (numerically) based. That's probably because they don't have the CPU or the screen to do much more. I agree - I don't think that's where it's going. I know as I started to do more fast touring and gravel riding, navigation suddenly went way up in my need hierarchy. Before that, when I was more training based, it was sort of "just the numbers, please." For that, I thought the Elemnt was a better choice but it's navigation borders on sucking.

Hammerhead says they are going to support the Varia Radars and I think that is something that should be done pretty easily with their Android OS. Given my tech background, I've been pretty active in side loading android apps into my Karoo and with the addition of Osmand and Komoot I get the best of all worlds of mapping. From some of the gravel riding we've done in the last year, we found that you just can't make it work with a single map source because none of them have all the detail you want. With the Karoo, and with Osmand side loaded, we were able to have both topo and TbT nav at the the same time. It's also pretty cool that using Komoot and Osmand both on the Karoo will give audio turn by turn directions if you have a BT earbud or a BT speaker connected. That, I have to say, is really nice and makes going back to the crappy buzzer/beepers that Garmin uses just not acceptable anymore.

Hammerhead has been hiring some pretty heavy weight navigation devs and some industry heavyweights have put some money into the company recently. Prior to the beginning of this season in North America, they really worked on reliability and stability which has improved. It's not perfect, but having had a lot of experience with other bike computers suppliers such as Garmin and Wahoo, none of them can really make the claim of having perfect reliability and stability either. So - I tend to really prefer the Karoo over the other two. Once they incorporate the Radar, (or let someone else do that through an Android App Store), then for sure, it's my top choice. Right now, the combination of side loaded Osmand/Komoot plus the Karoo mapping and display is pretty hard to beat for gravel/touring.

J.

DrIsotope

The potential is certainly still there, but no sensible person could ever claim that the Karoo wasn't an unfinished product that was rushed to market, and remains woefully incomplete here well over a year later. Mine was schizophrenic from day one, working perfectly on one ride and eating the next. Battery life was like spinning the wheel of fortune-- might be 7% per hour, might be 25%. Absolutely no way to tell.

But aside from an underdesigned quarter turn mount, the Karoo hardware is exceptional. Best screen on the market without question. The software is basically terrible. Hammerhead pushes out updates on a very regular basis, and they tend to break more than they fix-- I had no usable power data for about 4 months, and others still don't have consistent connection now. Perhaps hubris, HH deciding to "close" the software and using their own tweaked Android platform. If they had just open-sourced the OS from the beginning, someone would have built a stable software package for it, something that the people at HH have as of yet seem incapable of doing.

I miss my Karoo. I was easy to operate, and again-- that screen. But having to carry not just a second GPS unit due to the flakiness of the software in general, but batteries and cables on every... single... ride, that got tiresome after a year of doing it. I couldn't usually get 2 rides out of the Karoo (unless it was like a pair of 90 minute rides,) no matter the screen settings or sensors connected. I charge my Bolt once a week, and it requires no back-up recording.

JohnJ80

Sure, that was then and my experience wasn't much different but now, at least for me, it's much different and much better. The Karoo seems to be working fine for me and I'm happy with that.

J.

DrIsotope

Unless battery life has increased by 100% in the last 2 months, it stays in the box. I still follow the FB group posts daily, and it's most definitely not all sunshine and rainbows. Basic functionality still isn't there.

I'm not rushing out to try to sell it, but I'm certainly not rushing to put it back on the bikes, either. My original Karoo's charge port failed one day before it's first birthday. It was replaced by the Bolt immediately-- less than 36 hours later. I have since put 2,000 miles in with the Bolt, and it has been perfect, every day, every ride. 6-7% battery use per hour. If the Karoo could do a legitimate 10% per hour, and not randomly reboot at least once a week, it would get rehired. But it simply can't or won't, so it doesn't.

JohnJ80

My battery consumption went from 13% to 10% progressively with updates to around 6-8%/hr in the last general update. That's with the screen at around 1/3rd, power meter, hrm, speed sensor all connected via ANT+. So at those rates, that's 7.6 hours, to 10 hours to around 12.5 hours which exceeds their minimum spec of 10 hours.

Sure, it's not "sunshine and rainbows" but guess what, it's not over on the Garmin Edge 1030 forum either. My main point is this - they are making solid progress for which they deserve credit. It's reliable for my use case now and is the only bike computer I'm using since the snow melted.

J.

DrIsotope

You're not doing better than 10% per hour, you simply aren't. Because the Karoo continues to have deeply flawed battery management software, so the OS thinks the battery is dead when the gauge shows anywhere from 40 to 20 percent. I had mine do the "rapid drop to zero" from as high as 51% displayed. Thirty percent = zero seemed to be pretty common, my first Karoo could never, ever be trusted below 40% on the gauge. So I might average "ten percent" per hour for six hours, but that's all the Karoo would do. From 40% to auto shutdown, less than 2 minutes. So it was really using about 16.5% per hour. The actual mAh drained from the pack is irrelevant, because the Karoo thinks it's dead. So it is.

I was on the ATG from its inception, so it was normal behavior for me to let the battery run until it would go to rapid drain, every time. I had a 10,000mAh USB pack on the bikes at all times. Worst ever? 100% to rapid drain in 2h45m. Best ever? 100% to rapid drain in just under 8 hours. My Karoo was used to log around 250 rides, out of which ~40 were either errored (usually complete loss of one or more sensors,) corrupted (frozen during saving,) bad data, "eaten by device," etc. That's an 84% success rate, give or take. Everything I state about the Karoo is 100% objective. I logged in excess of 10,000 miles with it, unit on-time exceeding 800 hours. No guessed numbers, nothing from extrapolation. Just as my very first charge on the Bolt still had 16% battery remaining after 14 hours of on-time. I've never once had it drop below 20% charge before 12 hours of use.

Credit where credit is due. They could have fixed this by now. Every time I get an email asking me about suggestions for the next gen device, it's like the knife twists. I knew going in I was paying to be a beta tester. Turned out I was paying to be an alpha tester. It's been out a year. Forget all of the things we were promised-- basic functionality still isn't there. I hold out hope. But for now and the foreseeable future, the Bolt is my everyday computer. It just works.

JohnJ80

I'm pretty confident I'm meeting the spec of 10 hours. I've run it down near the bottom and that's where it seems to come out.

Also, I'd have to say that if you haven't used it recently, then we're not talking about the same device.

I also have a Wahoo Elemnt and an Edge 1000. The Element is pretty near bulletproof but it's a pretty basic unit too and nothing I'd ever want to use for any navigation in unfamiliar terrain (you'd better have a phone with google maps handy if you do). If it didn't "just work" it'd be a loser because it doesn't do a lot either. That's what they get for the simplicity - strong reliability.

It also looks like Wahoo is kind of running out of gas - the ROAM is overpriced and under featured for sure. To me, it looks like Wahoo ran out of gas on their software development. That's too bad, the Elemnt is a nice product but maybe not all that extensible unless they disprove that on the next pass. For my daily rides, I'm taking the Karoo.

Yes, it's true - it shouldn't have taken this long. But I am glad to see Hammerhead making pretty good progress. While it may feel good to bash them for their past fooling around, not a lot can be done about that. If they have development moving in the right direction now, that's good and maybe they get somewhere.

Lord knows we need something else out there other than Garmin (and their mediocrity). Overall, the state of bike computers as consumer electronics probably places them as a class down near the bottom anyhow. Somewhere, somehow maybe someone will fix that larger problem.

DrIsotope

We will forever be in agreement about Garmin. The last good computer they made was the Edge 500. That thing is the Nokia 3310 of bike computers. And head-to-head against the 1030, the Karoo is still an absolute winner. I will never buy another Garmin product.

I really just want the Karoo to be what they promised it to be.