Giant NeosTrack GPS Computer

The Giant NeosTrack is a good GPS that packs a fair bit of functionality into a well-rounded package. The battery life is excellent and day-to-day training use is its bread and butter. Navigation is poor, though.

• Pros: Great battery life, not expensive
• Cons: Interface a bit clunky, route display is poor

Giant has teamed up with GPS company Brtyon to produce the NeosTrack, and Bryton has form for making some decent units, so my hopes were high.

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The NeosTrack is a fairly big GPS (92.9 x 57 x 20.3mm, 78g) with a 2.6in monochrome LCD screen, and attaches to your bike with a quarter turn mount. It's not quite the same as a Garmin mount (or, indeed, the Bryton mount) so you'll need to use Giant's own mounts, and O-ring and out-front mounts are supplied in the box. They're fine, with no issues with fitting the mount or engaging the computer.

The NeosTrack has five hardware buttons. The one at the base of the unit turns it on, and also activates the backlight (which you can also set to stay on if you prefer). Then there are two on each side, which deal with stopping and starting recording and working through the menu system. They're a bit fiddly to use with gloves on, but not too bad.

The NeosTrack is a fully-featured GPS computer, and you can pair ANT+ and Bluetooth LE sensors to it. It can also connect to WiFi, allowing you to upload activities or download routes without going through your phone. Realistically, though, you're most likely to pair the NeosTrack to the app on your Android or iOS device. That allows you to upload activities and automatically sync with Strava or TrainingPeaks. It'll also make you aware of any firmware updates, and give you the option to apply them. You can also do this from a desktop computer, but essentially the two things are the same: the app is just a wrapper for the website, and the website is designed to mostly be used on mobile. So some of the screens look a bit bare.

The app also lets you create routes on your phone, although like all phone-based routing generators I've tried it isn't anywhere near as easy as doing it on a desktop computer. Again, you can use the web portal, but the route creation isn't nearly as good as it is on Strava, for example: you can't drag points around, so if you're planning a long route and you decide to change the middle bit, you're a bit stuck. If you go down the Strava route you can drag a .gpx file onto the GPS when it's plugged into your machine, just like you would with a Garmin. 

The NeosTrack has five configurable data screens: you can choose how much data you want on each, and what metrics you want to see. It's pretty easy to move stuff around, and the default sets make plenty of sense too. Setting them up isn't quite as easy as it is on some other GPS computers (especially ones with touchscreens) but it's probably only something you're going to have to do once, or at least infrequently.

You can set up up to seven bikes on the NeoTrack, and input all your personal data too.

Testing and tracking

Recording your rides isn't the only thing the NeosTrack is designed to do, though. It comes bundled with a set of standard tests – functional threshold power (FTP), max heart rate (MHR), lactate threshold (LTHR) and max aerobic power (MAP) – that you can run directly from the computer, either outdoors or on a trainer. On top of that you can input your own interval sessions and follow them, although it's a pretty fiddly job to get them set up through the user interface. Obviously you're going to need to add a power meter for an FTP test, or a heart rate monitor for a MHR/LTHR test.

The tests work okay: it's not quite the interactive experience of doing one on TrainerRoad/Sufferfest/Zwift but it'll do, especially if you don't do indoors. You can store your testing data within the NeosTrack app and track your progress there.

> Buyer's Guide: 11 of the best cycling GPS units

The NeosTrack is also designed to allow you to follow the routes you've uploaded. Here it falls down a bit, because it uses Bryton's semi-3D route rendering which has always been, and continues to be, awful. Instead of simply showing you the line and your position upon it, it attempts to render a quasi-3D looking-into-the-distance view based on what's coming up. I say 'attempts' because the render is so poor, and changes so much, that it's almost impossible to use at times. And I'm not talking about picking the right road on an acute fork, I'm talking about knowing which way to go at a right-angle T-junction. I found turn-by-turn instructions worked about as well as a Garmin, which isn't really high praise, but they're usable. If following GPX routes is something you do all the time, this is probably not the computer for you.

If you just want to log a lot of riding, though, it might be. It's pretty reasonable at £150 and does a pretty flawless job of keeping track of your rides, with uploading to the cloud a simple process, even if it's a bit slow.

The battery life is second to none: Giant claims it'll do over 30 hours, and while I didn't get to those heady heights (it was cold and dark, and I had the backlight on a fair bit) I did manage well over 20, which is a whole lot more than you'll get out of your Garmin Edge. Through the summer it'll probably be near what Giant claims it to be.

Verdict

Great battery life, and good for logging lots of riding, but routing isn't very good