Garmin releases Edge Explore 2 GPS with battery life up to 24 hours

I have just bought one of these devices. It arrived today and I'm still setting it up. However I can confirm it DOES have temperature. I'm pleased about that as I would have missed that too. It's currently adjusting to being outside and displayed temp is settling down at 33.7C on this day of heat red alert.

Thanks for the reply. I think I have just found my birthday present!!

The 820 seems to be the Garmin of Doom - very poor battery and very buggy. The 830 is better though has too many Garminisms. On my 800, I used non-Garmin mapping and had good experience, on the 830 I've removed most of the selling feature options and it is nearly very good. I understand that Garmin are starting to bring back waymark style navigation on newer models but...

The really old Garmins had brilliant navigation - a Garmin Etrex Legend, a walking device really but it did have a bike mount, allowed 50 points to be set and then the Etrex would calculate the route between them. If you went off course it would re-calculate to get you back to the waypoint until something persuaded it that the waypoint was missed and you picked up the route to the next waypoint. It worked very well except with the quality of mapping of 10 years ago you sometimes needed to use cunning to set your waymarks as what you designed on BaseCamp would not necessarily reproduce on the Garmin as the algorithm differed slightly.

Unfortunately, Garmin techies are the sort of people who think they know best and don't seem to be able to put themselves in users' cleats, so for a decade, cycling computer navigation has been buggy, unhelpful and confusing - broken unless you have the knack. (Even in the last year I've still had to explain to someone using an 800 to switch off recalculate and how you have to set the option for turn guidance every time you download a route - it's hard to credit how broken it is out of the box).

Secret_squirrel wrote:

If I remember correctly what differentiates the Explore range is a  much narrower range of supported Ant/BT sensors?  Is this still the case?

Basically yes, along with less customisation of data screens, and activity profiles. I think this new model does allow multiple profiles and connection of power meters, however much of the fitness analysis (VO2Max, normalised power, training load, etc) are missing. 

Supports HRM, that's all I care about.  But I do like the idea of cutting edge GPS, and that's only in the 1040, well let's wait for 840 eh - but £250 ain't bad when 830 is still a deal more atm.  Let's also see what 830 tumbles to.

That's the real problem, isn't it? The Explorer is simply a cycle training device with features removed rather than a navigation device designed for cyclists.

Garmin know about navigation for boats, cars and planes and walkers - but have a blind spot for cyclists.

After all, if a car satnav can let you wander off course and sort you out, why can't a bike satnav?

As I said above, what a cyclist typically wants are waymarks and to use the most cycling friendly routes to get there.

For example, I could imagine plotting a route in typical plot-a-route fashion. Then I want to be able to lock certain bits - if you miss this I want Garmin to tell me to turn around, others I don't really know or care enough, so if I go astray, I want Garmin to give me my best cycle friendly route to the next waymark. I want mapping good enough that if I plot a route on phone or PC, when I transfer the route to the Garmin, I get the same route (the eTrex problem was BaseCamp had a different routing algorithm to the eTrex).

It seems to me that the alternative Garmin's work the same as Garmin's - I've not heard anyone say how brilliant other devices are for bike navigation because they work fundamentally differently. Happy to be wrong on this but when I replaced my dying 800 this year, it was something I tried to find out about and failed.