Garmin Edge 305 First Impressions

Posted by Stephen Waits Tue, 24 Jan 2006 21:51:00 GMT

First Impressions

I took my new Garmin Edge 305 for its first spin today. I had preordered this awhile ago from GPSCity. However, thanks to bollar on the SportTracks forum, I learned that TVNav got them in earlier and even offered free next-day shipping. So, I cancelled my first order, reordered it Friday afternoon, and received it yesterday (Monday) morning.

Positives

• It’s small and light.

• Receiver sensitivity is incredible. Yes it will work indoors. Better than any other GPS unit I’ve ever used.

• Speed seems accurate. Reads out MPH to 1/100. For example, “19.52 MPH”.

• Smart recording works great.

• Auto Pause works really well. In an urban area, it never fails that you come upon a long traffic light mid-interval. Then it seems I’d usually forget to restart my HRM. Here it’s all taken care of for me.

• Interval programming in Advanced Workouts (via TC) is really cool. I’ve never been able to plan my workouts anywhere near this level of precision.

• The Altimeter screen is very cool. It’s both pretty and satisfying.

• The calorie calculation seems accurate.

• The UI is simple.

• TC found my previously installed MapSource map data (came with my Quest). That’s very cool!

• In general, it works almost exactly as advertised. This counts for a lot, because it’s advertised to do just about everything!

Negatives

• The zip-ties for the stem/handlebar mounts were all already zipped! What’s the point of that? None. Has to be a mistake.

• The reset button on my Cadence Sensor didn’t seem to do anything. Once I took the battery out and put it back in, it seemed to come alive. Update: bollar on the SportTracks forum had the same thing happen to him. Turns out the battery was installed backwards. I must have gotten it right when I put it back in!

• The little rubber mini-USB cover sucks. I am afraid it won’t last very long.

• Training Center, as well as the 305 itself, won’t let you setup intervals with more than one target. For example, I’d like an interval (“Steady State”) to include a cadence target of 90-100 RPM and a HR target of 85%. Still, it’s an improvement.

• “Heart Rate Too Low” and “Heart Rate Too High” warnings sound exactly the same. My Polar did a better job, if it was too low it beeped slowly. Too high, beeped quickly. I should not need to look down and read a tiny part of the display just to see if I’m too high or too low!

• My cadence sensor was intermittent. The readout would go something like 0, then 22, then 95, then 22, then 0.. repeat. I’ll work on sensor positioning and see if I can improve it.

• Displayed Heart Rate is rather lagged. This is probably so that they can smooth it out; however, I believe that they’ve over smoothed in this case. The result is that when you have a narrow target, such at HR 83%-87%, you get warned that you’re too low, yet the display is still reading high. You end up bouncing around. I’ll deal with it by practicing controlling my HR a little more precisely and widening my HR targets a bit.

• Other fields are lagged too, like Grade. It could be less smoothed.

• The HR strap worked like my Polar strap. Freaked out on me no less than three times. I’d stop, wet it, reposition it, and move on. I’ll try some HRM gel next time.

• They could have done so much more with the HR target display, or any target display (cadence, speed). A little bar graph, something like ===<*=T====== would show you where you are now (*), which direction you’re trending (<), and your target (T).

• The buttons are a little hard to push. And the way they’re oriented, on the sides and opposite each other, means that you might need to push against another button, or you might get a little too forceful and spin it around on the mount. That happened to me once today.

• It would be very nice to have a “Previous Page” button. “Mode” is like “Next Page”. I found myself really only wanting to see Bike Computer 1 and Workout pages.

• The elevation is decent, but not perfect. My inaugural ride ended up about 40’ different from start to finish. I can live with it.

• It doesn’t seem to remember my “Auto Pause” setting. Perhaps when I synced with my PC it got reset. I hope I don’t have to keep setting this at the beginning of every ride.

• Even though I never ride after sunset, I was surprised to have to manually turn on the backlight. The device knows local time, it knows sunset/sunrise times, so it should also know to just turn it on when I press any button, not just the power button. Could make a nice option anyway.

• Oh, and just one random, very minor idea. The device should be able to determine (and record) your rollout. In other words, your gear ratio. It knows cadence, speed, and wheel RPM – it’s only one tiny little math step away from recording rollout. Geeky indeed, but I’d be interested in plotting my gear ratio against elevation, heart rate, speed, etc.

Summary

Well, even though I listed more negatives than positives, I have to say this little thing is sweet. I hope, but doubt, Garmin fixes most of the niggles I mention in future firmware updates.

Overall, Garmin’s done an excellent job. I highly recommend this product to any cyclist!