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 6 days ago in reply to JayD
    JayD said:
    Yesterday, while on my gravel bike and riding in an area next to a bike-park, my 1040 wanted me to go down the downhill trails....

    No navigation system would deal with this the way you’d like. 

    JayD said:
    Sometimes there might be a couple of meters of detail missing on a train and because of that the unit does not know it could route through it so it goes around

    It’s not clear what you are saying here. 

    If part of the road/path is missing (if there is a gap) from the map, as far as any device would know, the way does not exist. No device would be able to route through gaps. Even if the gap is tiny. This missing “detail” is a map problem.

    JayD said:
    I also noticed that in my area some quite frequently used trails just disappeared from the maps (they were there some updates ago for sure!).

    This is odd. Note that the map data is “crowd sourced”. That is, the data depend on the public providing updates. Updates for things like highways is going to be more reliable than things like trail. Commercial maps will be updated more reliably but things like trails and cycling facilities might not even be included (these maps tend to be focused on driving and getting data for trails and such is expensive).

    JayD said:
    The reality of fact is that if you can, pre-plan the route (and even more variants of it) so to be able to not rely on Garmin SW

    Planning routes let you consider what you know, your preferences, and give you tools (like streetview) that no navigation system could ever provide.

  • 0 6 days ago in reply to dpawlyk

    I do not think no navigation system would not be able to deal with it. When I plan on Komoot, I hardly get those type of errors because the algorithm knows a gravel bike should not go down a trail with a huge height difference in 1 km length. Also there are other ways to distinguish this behavior which seem to work on other platforms but not Garmin.

    Do not get me wrong, I think the Edge is a nice tool and it definitely gets you home! But like on the Fenix, the SW could be improved.

    What I was saying is that in the digital map, sometimes might happen that few meters of a trail are maybe not continuously connected with the following intersection. Think about a minor map "bug": the trail is there but somehow the pieces are not fully connected (like a discontinuity on a function in math terms). This happens in my area in the Alps. 

  • 0 6 days ago in reply to JayD
    JayD said:
    I do not think no navigation system would not be able to deal with it. When I plan on Komoot, I hardly get those type of errors because the algorithm knows a gravel bike should not go down a trail with a huge height difference in 1 km length

    You can’t compare using a room full of computers (a bit of an exaggeration) to something you’d carry on a bike and want to run for hours on battery. 

    JayD said:
    Do not get me wrong, I think the Edge is a nice tool and it definitely gets you home! But like on the Fenix, the SW could be improved.

    You have to have realistic expectations. The computers in the Garmin devices are very slow. Much slower than the computers in typical smartphones. The computers that things like Komoot uses are much faster still.

    JayD said:
    What I was saying is that in the digital map, sometimes might happen that few meters of a trail are maybe not continuously connected with the following intersection

    That’s what I thought you were getting at. No navigation system would deal with this. This is a map-data problem. Seeing this as a “discontinuity” is useful because that’s exactly what it is.

  • 0 4 hours ago

    If I need to plan a route I do it in Gaia on my phone, then export to gpx, upload to Connect and sync to 1040. Doing it from Garmin apps is a lot worse. Plotting on device itself is even worse. I wish there was a way to share a POI from Google Maps and then route to it...