Best Bike GPS 2024 for under $500? Deep-Dive Comparison!
This is your complete bike computer comparison between the Garmin Edge 840, the Hammerhead Karoo 3 and the Wahoo ROAM V2. I've been putting these units through their paces over the last...well quite a long while in fact, but in particular here in the island of Gran Canaria, in the Canary Islands doing epic climbs, epic rides, epic everything on this bike with these three head units. To figure out all the differences, and where they work well, and where they maybe differ quite a bit. The tourism board of Gran Canaria actually reached out and offered to sponsor this video, but more about them of course a little bit later on in the video. For now though, I've got a whole bunch of different
topic areas I want to cover on this and so for that let's jump back over to the desk so I have things a little more organized... So here we are with the very first section, which is the pricing. In this case here are the prices on the screen right there. The thing to keep in mind is that these are all in the general ballpark, also keep in mind the Garmin Edge 840 has two different versions: One without solar, and one with solar. The solar one simply extends the battery life using the solar on
the outside edge there. That is the only difference between these models that are identical from a feature and functionality standpoint. Next up we got another quickie which is the mounts that are included in the boxes, there. All three of these include mounts that are out front mounts which is nice. Most by computers do today, and in the case of both the Garmin, as well as the Hammerhead mounts, you can also mount a GoPro or something like that below that mount if you buy an accessory for it. It's not included in the box unfortunately but you can put either bike lights or GoPro's or
action cameras whatever you want on the underside there. In the case of the Wahoo mount, it's got a so-called 'aero mount' so it's more aerodynamic and thus you can't mount anything on the bottom there but it is more aerodynamic in theory than the other two in fact years ago I even actually arot tested Wahoo's Arrow mount in a wind tunnel check out that video up in the corner okay so next up we've got the display touchcreen and kind of general usability of that display as you can see there's three different types of displays here in the case of the Hammerhead crew you've got more of like a cell phone type display in the case of the Garmin you've got less colors but still very very visible uh it's not quite that cell phone look to it and in the case of the waho you got even less usage of those colors in the different display elements in terms of seeing these three units outside in both sunny conditions as well as night conditions and literally everything in between there's no real problems on any of these they're all perfectly fine that said I've seen some comments say that the Hammerhead has like the clearest or most visible display out there and honestly it simply doesn't it is not hard to see just be very clear about this it is perfectly fine to see but if you were to objectively look at these three displays from the view of a py list uh you'll find that in super bright sunny conditions like I've been riding in the Canary Islands and other places you'll find that the Hammerhead crew isn't quite as visible off angle when you're looking directly straight down at it like like this camera above me here uh it is more clear but as you pull back the same position that you'd be riding a bike that's when you start to see some of those minor differences there again it's not really a big deal going to the other end of a spectrum at nighttime also no problems with any of the three units I saw some complaints that said that the crew was just way too bright and things like that at night honestly hasn't been an issue riding at night with it it's perfectly fine and viewable and especially if you switch it over to dark mode uh but again it's just not like a too bright sort of thing and inversely the other two are perfectly fine too so then what about the touchcreen well in the case of the Wahoo doesn't have a touchcreen so that makes that easy in the case of both the Garmin and the Hammerhead no problems even in dumping rain I did a test here with the crew out in dumping rain while I'm running along it's part of my full review zero problems there and the same goes for the Garment I did a test when that first released showing in the rain as well and no problems with the newer touchcreen on the Garin ed40 compared to some of their past units so then the last item is what about responsiveness in terms of the user interface and lag and things like that in the case of the Wahoo it's pretty good you could rotate through stuff there's definitely some delay there but it's not too bad if I look at the Garmin I can tap into things it definitely feels the fastest of the three uh looking at the Hammerhead it's certainly the slowest of the three and probably the best example is just simply swiping down you can just see there's just a lot of lag Ross the board there that said when you're out riding like once you open up the ride screen there and get in the ride this swiping left and right is pretty efficient in all this there's no problems there it's just pulling down from the top there that tends to be slow and tends to get slower as the ride goes on uh versus when I'm in a ride here again no problems like this and then simply swipe down it's instant to go through those pages the point of this section though is to not worry about this section all three are fine in the sun all three are fine in the dark all three are fine in between all those three things all three have a perfectly usable screen touchcreen scenario uh and all three of them are fine while you're rotting swiping between data Pages don't overthink this section despite what the internet might tell you the next question is what about the ease of use and the usability of the three devices there are some people that want a super easy to use device without a lot of features and some people that want all the features I think all three companies would agree that Garmin has the most features and even if they don't agree there's just no competition there they have the most features but as you add more features this is true of any software platform out there you have to intrinsically increase complexity to deal with all those features and Garmin has of course increased that complexity over time does that mean the Garment unit is harder to use no it just means there's more menus and things to dig around into and more places you can get lost finding those features for daily riding it's pretty straightforward you just tap it and you start riding like it's not that hard just like it's true for the Wahoo as well start ride just press start it's as simple as that and also in the case of the Hammerhead you want to ride you just either press the yellow button right there or press this and then press the yellow button all three devices are pretty easy to use you just simply tap and start going and when it comes to the core functions all three devices are easy to use there as well and one of those core functions is going to be the differences in the data pages and data fields all three devices have pretty much every data field you want on there so things like your speed and distance and time and ascent and calories and all that kind of stuff all of them are all there not a problem there where you start to see some of the differences on them is some of the graphical data Pages things like the charts and stuff like that Hammerhead and Garmin tend to have more of those natively built in versus huahoo doesn't have as many of the different graphics and charts on the unit itself while you're riding on the flip side one feature that Wahoo does have that the others don't is the ability to instantly increase or decrease the number of data fields on a single Data Page just by pressing the up and down one so you essentially can order your most important field in this case my power average over 3 seconds and then you can say you know what my second most important third most important and so on all the way down to your total list there you still have multiple Pages by just simply tapping the page button there but it does allow you to change kind of the focus area mid rde if you want to again some people really like that some people just simply never use it uh it gives you that flexibility there and on the flip side Garmin also has their connect IQ Data fields and data pages and apps that we'll talk about a little bit later on but that allows you to expand out all those data fields as well with thirdparty apps that are almost always free that said one thing of note is that Wahoo lacks any sort of bike profile concept so like Road biking versus gravel biking versus mountain biking which means that that's not going to feed into straa either uh and for some people again that won't matter but if you have multiple bikes in particular if you have multiple biking genres that you do and you want different data Pages or data fields for that the lack of that on Wahoo continues to stand out compared to virtually every other bike computer out there on the market today now we get to the most complicated of all the sections uh there is a lot of nuance here in this next one which is mapping and navigation so let's just start off how they're the same and then we'll dive into the differences first off all three offer mapping and navigation so on the mapping side all three offer free downloadable maps pretty much of every country in the world so there's not really any problems there how you download those Maps differ slightly on different units uh but at the end of the day you can get maps onto the unit and they include them for free no matter where you are in the world so then we get on to actually navigating something and navigating comes in a couple different forms one being downloading a route somewhere so from straa Kimu to rivo GPS Etc uh two being that you just instantaneously want to go somewhere you put a dot over there and say I want to go to this Dot somewhere across town or the city or whatever the case may be and then three being navigating back home somewhere so if you say I want to return to my starting point or return to my home Point again all three of these do that just fine then we get to the question of rerouting on the Fly you're going down the road you miss a turn how do all three of these different units deal with that and the answer is they deal with it just fine they reroute you based on the maps they have in the unit does not require internet connectivity and you'll basically catch up somewhere down the road on that particular route I've been putting that through this pce over the last little while and I haven't had any failures from any of these three uh their internal routing engines are very very good these days and all three companies have grown up and really kind of nailed the art of that so the question is where are those differences well the first one is actually going to be the map styling and the user interface itself as you're seeing on the screen right now they are different map Styles and how they look and I find in general I actually prefer Hammerhead styling uh you can see there that bright section that orangey color that is the heat maps that are based on sunos heat map map data now depending on where you are in the world you're going to get varying levels of success with that uh if you're in Europe or a lot of the US you're going to probably have pretty good luck with that in other places where sunto heat map data isn't as strong perhaps parts of Australia uh it's not going to be as good it just depends on how many suto users are out there cuz that's where that data comes from so when you look at on the unit it makes it super clear as to where people are actually rotting with my route overlay on top of that garment also has their own popularity routing data which is arguably a much better data set than any that Hammerhead has the display of that data doesn't tend to be like super awesome it kind of gets lost in the shule of everything meanwhile the Wahoo one tends to be the most minimalist with what it displays on the display from a mapping standpoint really just focused on here's your route and here's the main road that around you it kind of like just gets rid of all the Clutter everywhere else again it's all kind of what you want from a personal preference standpoint the other big difference between the three of them is when you want to go Rogue with the unit itself uh meaning that you have no planned routes you have uh no like anything else you just want it to tell you to go do something so in the case of Garmin you can say hey I want a 50 km ride and it'll go out and give you a 50 km ride based on all that heat map data and generally speaking those rides are very very good you can even tell I want to go to the west or the east or the South or whatever you want uh and in my experience those tend to be very good rides in the case of both Hammerhead and Wahoo you can't do that at all likewise only Garmin has a point of Interest database on there where you can search for things like bike shops and restrooms and water shops and coffee shops and all that kind of stuff on the Fly uh versus the other unit you'd have to use your phone to find the exact location or know the name of the thing you're going to in order to route to it meaning if you were to sum up this entire section if you've got a planned route from stra cud or something like that you're not going to see much difference between them what you do tend to see the differences is if you're just doing ad hoc routing on the Fly uh that's where the Garin is going to give you more ability to do that uh without any sort of connectivity versus the other two will require some sort of connectivity from your phone to be able to do that kind of planning on the fly now one you're probably likely to use the navigation features the most is when you are traveling so let's swing back into the port for a real quick second now as I mentioned earlier on this video is actually sponsored by the grand Canary tourism Board of course I've been coming here like I said for about a decade riding running hiking like doing all the sporty things in fact this past weekend my wife raced here she did the challenge family triathon great event for the entire family we went out here the kids cheered all day long from the swim to the bike to the run and when they had enough cheering then I got them ice cream and of course after that they just simply played on the Beast for a while while watching her race she won her age group by the way from a cyclist standpoint there's of course epic rides here you can do really long rides I've done 5 six plus 7h hour rides in the past but it's also great for a lot of shorter rides too like yesterday morning after the family and I finished our breakfast they headed to the pool and I just simply head up into the mountain SP about 2 and 1 half hour ride nothing too crazy in the cool Parts there's tons of other sports here to do as well I was out doing a lot of running and hiking and an absolute boatload of swimming I've swam every single day at least twice a day out doing testing of GPS watches making a great place to escape to in the fall winter and spring cuz you don't need a coat or anything like that for any your activities but in the highly unlikely event that you do get bad weather the hotel I'm staying at back there actually has two Kicker bikes in there I'm not kidding two Kicker bikes with whift the whole thing is absolutely insane maybe I'll do just a video on that just because I've never had a hotel have kicker bikes and that's pretty darn cool and of course the food is good too which is like the two things you need as a cyclist uh anyways definitely check out island of grand Canary if you're looking for a place to escape to as an athlete it is a pretty awesome spot okay so what about climbing and climb related metrics uh so when you're going up a mountain uh obviously I did a ton of that in Grand Canaria and in this case I'm using the climb Pro equivalencies on each these three units they all call them different things but it's the same general concept of showing you information about that climb automatically and for all three units they do this both for Planned routes as well as on the fly so if you're just rotting along without any planned route and you're going up a hill it'll be like hey I know where the top of this climb is automatically here's your distance to the top of the climb here is the uh average incline both upcoming as well as total left here is your total altitude left to go to the top all that is pretty good and in my testing all these three did very very similar across the board uh Hammerhead has improved the European Maps back a couple months ago and that does seem to have made a pretty good difference in the upcoming elevation gradient numbers so like 8% 7% Etc being more accurate in Europe or in the past it was really pretty like random sometimes as to when it was accurate so then looking at a different sort of segment what about straval live segments all three of them support straval live segments that means that if you have a Strava premium account or basically a paid account uh they'll pull in those Strava live segments that you favored it and then show you your progress on that segment against your competitors or against the K Etc now while all three have this feature there are some notable differences in this case Hammerhead for me easily Takes the Cake uh one both Hammerhead and Wahoo support multiple concurrent segments meaning that you can have two or three segments that are overlapping showing up at the same time you just simply tab through them Garmin only supports one segment at a time being shown that really notable on sometimes those big climbs where you may have different segments some to the very top some do like a turnoff Point Etc that you just simply would not see in the case of Garmin now if straa life segments aren't your jam don't worry you can disable it across all three of them no problems at all uh so it'll never show you any of that at all so continuing to dig deeper what about structured workouts all three of these do support structured workouts so the ability to have a pre-planned workout that comes from some sort of training platform like training Peaks or train a road all three of them do support that Wahoo also supports their own system platform as well for pulling in workouts from that and then Garmin supports every other platform on the planet and this is one of those things where this is where you see the big difference uh for Garmin if you don't have training Peaks or trainer road because they have final Surge and exert and again like literally dozens and dozens of different companies out there push structure workouts to Garmin then when it comes to actually doing that workout outside you can see some of the side by side right here I find that both the Garmin and Wahoo implementations really understand the structured workout mindset of an athlete and how that is supposed to work Hammerhead doesn't seem like they understand that they're just missing some core data fields and data pages when you're actually doing that workout that you want to know and the display of those Target ranges is just really weird uh see even Wahoo agrees right there uh still the Hammerhead has been adding and making some changes to the structure workout even the last firmer update two weeks ago so they do seem to be listening to the feedback from basically everyone on that and hopefully they'll be able to address some of those gaps here soon lastly for lack of any where else to stick this Garmont also has their power guide feature which kind of fits into structure training in a way power guide allows you to go ahead and load up a race course the actual file like a GPS file uh of a route that you may be doing from there it will give you the actual power targets for each chunk of that particular route so a different Power Target when you're going up a climb and then based on a climb gradient it'll change those power targets and so on uh and you can adjust that in real time as well neither other unit has that so it's something to keep in mind if you want that kind of feature the next category is things like physiological metrics and this will be a relatively straightforward category because there's only one company that has it Garmin neither Hammerhead or Wahoo have any sort of physiological metric so things like training load training recovery training status load Focus all those kind of various stamina Etc uh those are all things that are only on the Garmin unit that Wahoo and hammerhead haven't even tried to touch likewise only Garmin will actually give you suggested workouts so if you want to put a Fondo on your unit uh it'll tell you which workouts to do every single day basically give you a coaching plan uh for that particular either race that you have the other two don't do that same goes for having a complete calendar of your upcoming workouts and all that kind of stuff that's only on the Garment side now a lot of people don't care about that at all and that's perfectly fine but it is a pretty big differentiating factor between Garmin and the other units if that is a feature that you care about speaking of physiological metrics one that kind of get grouped into that is Crash detection uh neither of the other two units have it only Garmin has crash detection so if you do crash in the case of grar it'll notify your friends and family automatically uh that way can call for help or something like that versus the other two units will just shrug and kind of laugh at you so next up what about battery life uh now all three of these have the claim battery life on the sheet right there that you can see but let's talk about real world battery life now certainly if we look at those claim specs we would see that the hammer has the least amount followed closely by Wahoo and then Garmin is just way beyond their competitors reality check from the real world that's pretty much the way it works out as well here is a battery chart from one ride right there showing my actual data from that ride the Hammerhead ended up about 12 1/2 hours the Wahoo ended up about 23 or so hours and the Garmin was on track for 32 hours of battery life all three units were configured the exact same in terms of like brightness levels as well as sensors connected and all that kind of goodness so they're pretty even across the board so you can get even more battery life if you want to especially in the case of the Garmin you can not only decrease the display brightness which tends to be the biggest driver of battery consumption on these three devices but also decreasing down from multiband or dual frequency GPS to a more basic GPS uh set setting for areas that don't have a lot of GPS complexity will drastically increase your battery life okay so next up we got sensor connectivity how do they handle connecting things like power meters and heart rate straps and all that kind of stuff all three of them support pretty much all the majors that you can see right there all that stuff is covered of both amp Plus and Bluetooth smart now the elephant in the room is that the Hammerhead crew 3 does not support Shimano di2 displaying that stats uh I've covered that in my entire review that's a big old like thing where Shimano has basically blocked and banned and hammerhead from supporting that despite every other device on the planet supporting it just fine I don't know if that's going to change there is a third party app called ki2 which you can download and install on your Hammerhead crew device but that's not yet available for the crew 3 once it is then that solves a problem for you it's available for the crew 2 already so it's not a problem there uh but right now it's not yet available for the crew 3 beyond that there are a crap ton of other sensors out there that are somewhat Fringe but if you've got one then you probably want that connectivity that are large only supported on the Garmin platform via connect IQ for example AOS sensors for time trial bikes or things like that is only the Garmin side of stuff so that then Segways nicely into thirdparty Integrations and apps which basically has kind of two layers to it the first is connectivity to third party platforms like Strava and training Peaks Etc all three got you covered there for all the major platforms out there but as is the common theme here if you get to a platform that's not one of those top like 6 to 10 that's really only going to talk to Garmin which connects to I'm guessing hundreds if if not thousands of platforms out there platforms you've never heard of and will'll probably never hear of but if you're one of the users of those platforms then you probably want that connectivity so again you got to kind of figure out what you want from there you get into the actual apps that run the devices themselves uh starting off on Wahoo doesn't support any apps then you get to Hammerhead you can run Android apps on this so you can put Spotify on there or uh this whiff companion app and things like that but those apps as of right now don't really integrate with the rest of the Hammerhead data set or kind of features there so they're really just running on the side just like an Android phone were and then you get to the Garment side of it which of course has all of their entire connect IQ platform for data pages and data fields and standad apps and all that kind of stuff uh for some people they'll never use any of that stuff yeah other people might for other Integrations to other sensors or displaying other data types or recording other data types okay so next up we've got the manufacturer provided phone and web and kind of app Platforms in other words the things that support these devices well all three of them have apps for your devices but are drastically different in the case of the Hammerhead crew It app is basically just a connectivity straw to the Internet it's a tunnel to the internet for connectivity there is really no features whatsoever in the app that you can actually interact with you can't see like your ride totals or things like that uh up from there you've got Wahoo where you can see your ride totals and ride stats you can change settings you can do quite a bit you can do basically everything that you want to do uh but then one layer from there is garmin's app which has tons of trending and Reporting and all the things in the world that you want some might argue way too many things but those things do exist there and thus you have to at least consider that it has way more features from an app stpoint a native app standpoint anyways than the other two on the website side of things Wahoo doesn't actually have a consumer facing website so that makes that easy Hammerhead does have a website that you can look at your past rides just at an individual level you can't do like trending over months or things like that uh but you can go ahead and plan routs there and the route planner is very good allows you to go ahead and pull in files as well as uh URLs from major route platform so that all works pretty well and then in the Garment side again a massive web platform that is just well beyond the other two ultimately you see three different philosophies from the three different companies Garmin aims for the holistic philosophy of they're going to cover everything that you might need you can get it from garmon for free within their app their website everything all that kind of stuff is covered uh Wahoo kind of straddles the middle ground there of they want to provide you all those core functions and then Farm out the rest to thirdparty platforms so if you want more in-depth analysis of your rides then go off to trending Peaks or something like that and then Hammerhead is really just focused on the device itself uh yes they have the web platform for planning a route but that mostly comes from Hammerheads history on the routing side once you get beyond that routing area there's just really no other features at all except for things on the device itself okay so the last section then is GPS accuracy as well as elevation accuracy and I'm happy to report all three of them are great all three of them have multiband or dual frequency GPS all three of them have very solid altimeters the Hammerhead crew 3 got it updated altimeter there and I haven't had any problems from a sensing standpoint on my rides with these units I did have a single ride in the case of the crew where did not correctly do its calibration at the beginning of the ride Hammerheads looking into that software bug but that wasn't a sensor issue that was just the software didn't do the calibration it was supposed to the beginning of the ride and thus its altimeter data was offset from the rest of the ride in my written review though I go into tons and tons of data sets from all three of those units if you want to look at that data more deeply okay there you go a complete look at every single feature difference keep in mind my written review of this also dies even more deeply into some of the stuff I just couldn't possibly cover without this video being like an hour long but again all three units are great you're going to be happy with any of these three units it just depends on which portion of which feature is most important to you and then from that just look back at all these different sections and figure out uh which unit does it the best for your particular needs as always if you found this video interesting or useful just give it a like at the bottom there or subscribe for plenty more Sports technology goodness there is it's going to be a busy June have a good one
2024-06-02 08:38
