I'll be honest. I'm a bit disappointed with the Edge 830. It's a good device and, finally, the battery life is where it needs to be and I don't need to worry about leaving the map up on a long ride.
But (and it's a big but), it's got a list of software bugs that drive you to distraction. My current hit list are:
- Phone connectivity sucks. I've not got a sneaky suspicion that GC on Android is as much responsible as the 830 itself, but as I can't actually engage support on the issue, I'm really none the wiser. The device simply will not stay connected to my phone for any extended period during a ride.
- When you drop off a course, the distance to go seems to go beserk, oscillating between "0.25 miles" to "40 miles", only settling on a sensible number once the course is rejoined. My old Edge 1000 would simply freeze it at the last known value, which was much more useful. I suspect that this is because of...
- Terrible navigation routing. Go off course and you might as well stop and ask for directions from the lampposts, because their advice is likely to be as good as the rerouting on the Edge 830. Even when the course is 0.25 miles ahead up a straight road, it will persist in telling you to "U turn", making a bit of a mockery of the feature
- Increasingly, I'm finding that the GPS signal is poor in tree coverage, or other areas without a 100% clean line of sight of the sky. This is most noticeable in the speed reading, which starts to bounce all over until you return to open sky. Even a modest amount of foliage causes very erratic readings
- ClimbPro is mostly good, but I still can't help thinking that the detection algorithm isn't quite there, occasionally missing off sections of hills, or including miles of relatively flat trails between two larger climbs. I won't be overly critical here, as I do think this is one of the better, new features on the device.
- Inconsistent zoom levels on the map, which refuse to stay "stuck" when changed to a non-default value. Really irritating, but discussed in several other threads.
- My latest one was not being able to copy a GPX file to the device until I emptied the existing fit files from "courses". Suspiciously, I had exactly ten existing course files in there, so is this really the maximum limit of courses on the 830?
- GC update killing localhost phone connections for IQ apps. Gimporter/gexporter filled an important hole in your software and killing them, even inadvertently, has been painful. I notice that. even now, this hasn't been properly fixed even two months after being broken.
Out of all of these issues, it's the phone connectivity that really sucks. Not being able to download GPX files from my phone (thanks for killing Gimporter / Gexporter) is one thing, but the more or less complete unreliability of LiveTrack and the incident detection and reporting negate two of the big reasons that I bought this device and are making me seriously consider sending it back until such time as the firmware is sorted.
I'd consider offering myself to be a member of a beta program, but being brutally honest, I think I already am... :-/
