Why is navigation on Edge so complicated and poor? ‍

7712758
1 month ago

Good morning everyone! I recently bought a Garmin Edge 1040 and it's a fantastic bike computer! However, I'm on vacation these days and I'm having a lot of difficulty with navigation. Why did they make it so complicated? Komoot it's 10 time better And even easier to use. Pensive There are many functions that cannot be activated if you are recording an activity (if I want to go to a place for example, I can not write the name of the city, why!?) If I have done 100km and I have to do another 100km, I don't really feel like stopping the activity and doing two, it doesn't seem like a logical thing to do, right? Trip planning from both my phone and Garmin is terrible, even trip planning from my computer and browser is bad and poor, why!? Navigation should be much smarter like Google Maps, not constantly telling me to make a U-turn. I would also need a distance counter and the time I have left to get to the specific place I set, like on Google Maps. Another very bad thing is that when I want to go back to the beginning of the ride where I started from I want to be able to choose between the routes to take, maybe I don't want to climb a mountain again.

  • 0 19 days ago in reply to DirtJezus
    DirtJezus said:
    It’s funny because my iPhone does all of those hundreds of things really well. My Garmin edge, which costs about the same, and can only do 1% of what my iPhone can do, does none of them well.
    DirtJezus said:
    I think it you disabled every single feature and had only a blank screen - it still would crash. 
    DirtJezus said:
    The Garmin equivalent of ”she has a really good personality.”

    I'm confused. Why have you not sold or tossed your Edge 1040? Peeing into the wind will not make you happier. Put your iPhone on the bars and get on with it.

  • 0 18 days ago in reply to bbrannon

    I almost chucked it on my last ride… but I was riding with my wife and she bought it for my birthday.. LaughingLaughing

    I actually really like Garmin’s excellent training echo system so I’m kind of stuck with it, notably the performance data provided by First Beat technologies. But as a hardware device, except for excellent battery life, the edge is pretty piss poor. I’ve been using one since the 705, and my current 1040 is hardly a step up from my old 800.

    My main gripes with Garmin are their inability to fix bugs without creating new ones - then reintroducing the original bug when they release a new feature, and then finally fixing it but only releasing it to newer devices. There is no excuse that after making bike computers for 20 years that the current device still feels like it’s holding on by a thread. Garmin’s expertise is GPS, yet navigation on all of their devices is cringe AF.

    It’s not getting the simple features right that can be infuriating, like proper gradient calculation, especially when it worked previously. Even my old 800 calculated gradient correctly. With my iPhone - I can plug it into pretty much anything - including a hamster wheel - and I can expect it to charge. With Garmin, the device turns on every time you plug it in. It charges differently depending on what color cable is used. With a Garmin cable it doesn’t even display a charge symbol while it does with a generic one. Sometimes it fully charges, and sometimes it doesn’t (I’m convinced it uses the same random number generator as the gradient field). And good luck charging with an external battery pack SobGun

    Every Garmin feature has a dozen use cases why it doesn’t work as intended - and the device as a whole feels like it’s running an old version of Windows 3.0.

  • 0 18 days ago in reply to DirtJezus

    Yet we keep buying them? If any of the alternate brand devices were acceptable then there would be a stampede to that brand but reports of others don’t inspire. As for phones, many of my regular rides are 12 hours and if I am especially deranged can be 40 or more, phones don’t cut it but my 1040 can last 80, 90 hours (with aggressive battery saving settings). Just following a loaded course, turn guidance disabled, no phone connection with  all the “connected” features off. Never had a crash, re-boot or freeze in 3 years but it does bother me I paid a lot of money and (have to?) disable 90% of the functionality to ensure stability and relatability .

  • 0 18 days ago in reply to Jan_Mantau

    It is marketed primarily as bike navigation GPS device with a touchscreen. Everything else is built on tracking cycling activities. Seems you’re misinformed. Read their own marketing!

  • 0 18 days ago in reply to DirtJezus

    Urmmmm you know Garmin was founded as a GPS company for aviation right?! Then branched out into other sports… way before Waze or Google maps we were reliant on Garmin and tomtom for navigation. 

    just every other company has far surpassed Garmin now on their primary core feature which is mapping. we saw what happened to blackberry and Nokia. Garmin really needs to address their focus and listen to people’s frustrations… 

  • 0 18 days ago in reply to DirtJezus

    Well, they are a GPS company... they still sell maps and GPS units for a lot of different purposes.

    Given the maps that are quite good, I guess their problem is in the software. The different departments likely do not talk with each other and the better navigation algorithms from automotive are not translated the same way to cycling.

  • 0 18 days ago in reply to JayD
    JayD said:
    Given the maps that are quite good

    The maps are 95%+ from OpenStreeMap (OSM) which are created and maintained by thousands of contributors, Garmin adds minimal extra , you can download the originals (free) from numerous sites 

  • 0 18 days ago in reply to deandon

    I did exactly that. Garmin states 24 main features on their 1040 product site https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/731139/ and only two of them near the end refer to searching on the map.