Garmin-Matthew After a first few rides, I think the Edge 130 Plus is great! Here are a few areas for improvement:
- Bugs
- I use my E130+ on a road and mountain bike. On my road bike, I have a Varia RTL510 which I have paired to the E130+ as a light and radar. When going on a MTB ride (without the Varia), the radar icon in the upper right hand corner blinks the whole time as if it's looking for the Varia. I would think this is something that should time out after a few minutes of not finding one (or, even better, if it didn't even try when I select 'Mountain' as my ride type)
- I ride with a Fenix 6 along with the E130+ and use the F6 as my recording device because I use the wrist HR. So the E130+ is just a way to view data more easily during a ride. That said, ideally I would like to save rides on my E130+ to keep a running odometer and be able to ride activities later more easily. As such, I have unselected 'Auto Upload Activities' under GCM > Device > E130+ > General. But that setting never seems to be respected, as the activity shows up in GCM anyway. And then I have to delete the duplicate ride from both GCM and Strava.
- Related to the above, Recovery Advisor seems to be affected by both units logging rides. In one example, immediately after a ride my F6 showed a Recovery Time of 32 hours but then that decreased shortly thereafter to 16 hours (I think after the identical activity from E130+ uploaded). I would think if anything the Recovery Time would increase if GCM actually thought I did two different rides but I can't think of any other reason why my Recovery Time changed at that moment (and have never seen that happen prior to using the E130+)
- The E130+ altimeter generally registers ~10% less total ascent on my road and mountain bike rides compared to my F6. I don't know which one is more accurate but it's been consistent enough for me to report.
- Suggestions
- I understand there's probably processory/memory capacity implications to allowing different data screens for different ride types but at least allowing two different data screen activity profiles would be great and I imagine would cover the majority of riders. For me, the ability to have different data screens for Road and Mountain would be so helpful!
- Please allow an 'off' option for backlight
- Please allow an option to change the volume of audible alerts (very loud, which is appreciated, but could be a bit quieter)
- Long-standing challenge that needs to be solved better: handling redundant data after riding with a Garmin watch and bike computer simultaneously (which I think likely applies to a lot of Garmin bike computer owners). Building on bugs #2 & 3 above, I think Garmin can do better in this relatively common use case. I can think of a few potential options:
- When using both for an activity, GCM should be smart enough to only retain one activity (maybe user selected preference as to which device to prefer or consider 'master')
- If I select F6 as my 'master' or 'recording' device, it would be nice for me to be able to start a Bike or MTB activity on my watch and then have it start automatically on my E130+
- Extended Display has potential as a solution but right now it's limited given the fixed datafields at top (including lap time, which I generally don't find helpful while biking) and limited ability to customize datafields. If the datafields were fully customizable, I would prefer this solution because I would think it also uses a lot less battery (with its own internal GPS off, just showing data from my F6)