Giving up on the 820; Garmin, I want a refund!

Funny

Kinda funny to read all this. The Edge 820 is actually the first garmin in ages to work without issues for me. Super Steady, super exact no issues at all. Battery is fantastic. I have to say i never ride with turn on turn, what for? I know where i am going and always ride new routes and courses so i dont need to follow anything.

Kinda funny to read all this. The Edge 820 is actually the first garmin in ages to work without issues for me. Super Steady, super exact no issues at all. Battery is fantastic. I have to say i never ride with turn on turn, what for? I know where i am going and always ride new routes and courses so i dont need to follow anything.

Do you mean you don't use the navigation at all i.e. not even to follow a route transferred from RideWithGPS, for example? If so, how do you know where you're going on a new route? Or did you just mean you don't use the built-in routing on the 820?

Garmin vs Bolt

Have both and each of those devices has its strenghts and weaknesses. It`s not that Garmin is bad and Bolt so great or the other way around.

I personally prefer Garmin as it better suits my needs. It has FE-C so I can control my Neo which is great. It has some really great IQ applications which add new dimension for me (Xert). I can also control the camera from the unit. Navigation on road is excellent. Course riding is great even on trails (MTB). Garmin has the best implementation of Livetrack and Grouptrack. Livetrack is automatic and has full ride info (my wife do not worry about me).

At the same time Gamin shorcomings are Bolt biggest strenghts. Bolt`s buttons always work which is not the case of Garmin screen when is cold (i don`t have problems in rain). Software is very responsive and intuitive opposing to Garmin. You can ride course and Strava segments as well as several segments concurrently (IMO Wahoo has the best Strava implementation on the market). Bolt also supports Bluetooth sensors though I only use ANT+

Both have solid battery lives though Bolt has the upper hand if in navigation mode. One can say importing tracks to Bolt unit is easier. In my view Garmin with its IQ routeCourse app has similar capabilities.

I wish Garmin had the same level of enthusiasm and dedication for software as Wahoo people....

Kinda funny to read all this. The Edge 820 is actually the first garmin in ages to work without issues for me. Super Steady, super exact no issues at all. Battery is fantastic. I have to say i never ride with turn on turn, what for? I know where i am going and always ride new routes and courses so i dont need to follow anything.

LoL !!! When my 820 is in the drawer of my desk it's fabulous perfect, without any issue at all !!!
It is suppose to be a GPS and the first goal of such a machine is guidance, no?

It is suppose to be a GPS and the first goal of such a machine is guidance, no?

It appears that most people don't use these devices for guidance.

The primary purpose, as they are actually used, appears to be to record data. There are very few issues with that.

The navigation stuff should still work.

The first purpose of a GPS is hinted at by the name. Global positioning system.

Routing is satellite (assisted) navigation. Not the same thing at all. Like the www isn't the internet.

I am not going to found out the exact definition of what a 820 is, but his first job is clearly to guide us on a route that we have decide to follow and this with all the possibility's and skills it is build (it doe's not matter if we know where we are or not).
I perfectly know that 85% of the owners are simply not capable to use the unit for what it is made, I notice this every Sunday by the club ride, most have it because it looks good on the bike.
Now, it is not my problem what everybody do whit their unit, I only ask the Garmin guy's to made the 820 working as good as my 800, that's all

820 vs. Bolt

Have both and each of those devices has its strengths and weaknesses. It`s not that Garmin is bad and Bolt so great or the other way around.
.......
Both have solid battery lives though Bolt has the upper hand if in navigation mode. One can say importing tracks to Bolt unit is easier. In my view Garmin with its IQ routeCourse app has similar capabilities.

I wish Garmin had the same level of enthusiasm and dedication for software as Wahoo people....

What MACK068 said. I received my Bolt about a week ago and have been riding with both it and the 820 on my bike....and, the bottom line is that they both have their pros and cons, depending on your use case. If you're downloading courses from third-party sites like Ridewith GPS, the Bolt is much more reliable -- and it doesn't (and cannot) re-route you when you go off course -- which I consider a positive, but others may view it exactly opposite.

You can also zoom in and out easily on the map to find where your route went if you go off course (but no panning), and the Bolt redraws without delay. This is literally impossible on the 820, the processor is so underpowered, although it purports to have that functionality. The 820 is better on paper, because the maps are more detailed and include street names (the Bolt doesn't, although its turn by turn directions and cue sheets do), but this feature of the 820 simply doesn't function acceptably in practice.

You also don't have to wait an interminable amount of time for the Bolt to "calculate" your turn-by-turn route when you first load and want to ride a course. It's ready almost instantly, as compared to literally more than 5 minutes of waiting with my 820 if it's a long (e.g., > 50 mile) course.

I haven't tested it long enough to be sure, but the Bolt has not had any inexplicable freezing problems and I suspect, between the lower detail of the maps, the absence of a touch screen, and better CPU (guessing here), it won't. As I and others have mentioned, there have been numerous times that the 820 just freezes and the screen goes blank -- and I have to reboot and reload the course...and wait.

The Bolt pages through your data screens with hard buttons. I most likely this, and don't have the frustration of missed touches, or questionable reactivity with gloves, but you can't go in reverse (at least yet). Instead you have to cycle through all of your screens to get back, for example, to the immediately prior one.

Lastly, I do think the 820 display, which is only an itsy bitsy bit larger than the Bolt, is more legible in terms of its font (including its turn-by-turn directions being easier to read), and, in my subjective opinion, more aesthetically pleasing. If I were to keep the Wahoo (what??), I might actually consider the larger, original, Elemnt (which gets all the same software updates and features as the Bolt).

But, as hinted at above, I'm not going to keep the Bolt. Nor am I going to keep using the 820 (double-what???). I really like the Varia Radar integration of the Garmin units, as well as the incident detection feature (I ride alone a lot), which I can attest to actually working (first serious accident in 50+ years of riding last November, alerted (and scared) my wife).

So I'm rolling the dice and taking a chance with the Garmin 1000 Explorer. Kind of crazy given how much I hate Garmin software and customer support (Wahoo is amazing, both in terms of number of upgrades and responsiveness). But I'm hoping the 1000 Explorer (I don't care about the missing workout and power measurement features from the regular 1000; and I love that the Explorer does not have a Virtual Partner that you can't turn off) is closer in processing power and capabilities to my old 800, while incorporating the bluetooth and other integration/functionality features of the 820 series. But I'm hedging my bets. Buying it from REI with its excellent return policies!

Will report back when I know more.....Good luck to everyone with their respective unit choices and preferences!

The Bolt uses something similar to "course points". The Garmins support "course points" and there's no waiting to use them.

Yes, but unless it's a tcx file, you won't get turn by turn pop-ups. And, to get a tcx file on a Garmin, you generally need to have a computer (IQ apps like RouteCourse don't deliver you turn by turn unless you run the lengthy, time-consuming Garmin calculation (and then you get virtual partner, which you can't turn off, and course recalculations, even if turned off). With the Bolt, I can plan a route remotely on my cell phone with Komoot (easy) or ridewithGPS (a bit harder) and have it sync and give me turn-by-turn instructions.

The 820 might be too slow but the ability to calculate routes on the device is useful (to some people). For the Wahoo units, you need a smartphone and internet access

Let's be clear what this means. If you're in a place without internet access, and you want to go somewhere that you haven't already planned, and you're willing to trust Garmin algorithms for getting you there (which may take you on major, non bike-friendly roads in my experience), then yes, the 820 offers you this functionality (but heaven forbid you try to pan the map to see what route it's actually planned -- you'll be standing by the side of the road forever). Or, you could pull out your cell phone and use downloaded area maps. :)

There has to be some reason the 820 battery life is as long as it is (it's longer than the larger 1000). I suspect one reason the battery life of the 820 is as long as it is is because the CPU is especially slow. It appears the CPU is faster in the 1000 series (faster than the 800/810).

@dpawlyk -- are you a Garmin employee? I appreciate the info about battery size and CPU speeds, but are those just educated guesses or sourced from somewhere authoritative? And, by the way, although I didn't run it down to zero, after 3 hours of riding with the Bolt (connected to my phone), it was still at 82% battery, which translates out to way better than anything I've gotten with the 820 (I'm not saying the 820 is bad, but I haven't been able to extract more than about 12 hours from it (but, in fairness, with the Varia, it's running more processes....)