Garmin Edge 800 review

The Edge 800 is Garmin’s latest and greatest satnav for cyclists. It’s a formidable device and, although the price will make even hard-core riders baulk, it’s packed with features.

This Garmin sat nav is smaller than you might imagine – more the size of a traditional mobile phone rather than an iPhone. It has a 2.6in screen but, unlike just about every other satnav around, has a transflective screen. This means it’s perfectly viewable in bright sunlight without the backlight turned on. Viewing angles aren’t particularly wide, though, so you may not be able to mount the 800 on your bike’s stem as the bundled mount has no adjustment. In order to tilt the screen to the right angle, you’ll have to mount it on your handlebars. Fortunately, it’s waterproof, so you can use it in the rain.

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There are various bundles available. This is the top-of-the-range package which comes with a wireless speed/cadence sensor, a ‘premium’ heart rate monitor with a soft strap, plus a 4GB microSD card pre-loaded with City Navigator: detailed road maps of Europe. The basic package, which contains the Edge 800 only, costs £310. Adding a heart rate monitor and speed/cadence sensor brings the price to £355. Another £40 buys the City Navigator maps. Alternatively, you can have the Discoverer maps, which contain full Ordnance Survey coverage of Great Britain. This is around £100 more expensive than the City Navigator maps.

Installation

As there are no wires, installation is straightforward. Just bear in mind that the speed/cadence and heart rate sensors may not be detected until you rotate the pedals or rear wheel, and actually put the heart rate monitor on. The quarter-turn mount for the Edge 800 is superb, holding the device secure but allowing it to be removed in the blink of an eye. Configuring the 800’s settings will take a while longer, a process that’s not helped by the poor documentation.

The good news is that you can customise the ‘timing pages’ so they display as much or as little information as you like. There are five screens and each can show between two and 10 data fields. You’re spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing which items to show – so many, in fact, that they’re divided into categories: cadence, calories, course, distance, elevation, general, heart rate, navigation, power, speed, timer and workouts. We set the main screen to show speed, cadence (pedal revolutions per minute), time, temperature (using the built-in thermometer), and distance, but you can choose any combination for any screen.

It’s possible to create profiles for up to three bikes, but you’ll need to buy additional mounts (£9) and possibly speed/cadence sensors (£45) to use all the functions on each bike (there are two handlebar mounts included in the box, though). If you buy a bundle without the sensor, speed is determined using GPS, but you won’t get cadence.

Display

When you turn the 800 on, you’re presented with the first timing screen. This looks much like the display of a high-end bike computer, with black text on a white background. You can also choose white on a black background. As it’s a resistive touchscreen, you have to prod fairly hard to select things, but it’s possible to swipe between screens and menu options, just like on a smartphone or tablet. There are only three physical buttons: on/off, start/stop and lap/reset. The GPS receiver is stunningly sensitive. Not only does it acquire a signal faster than most car satnavs we’ve tested, but it’s also more accurate: you can see which side of the road you cycled on when zooming into the route on Google Earth or in the Bing map within Garmin Connect (see below).

Navigation

Arguably the biggest feature is turn-by-turn navigation. The 800 can act just like a car satnav in that you enter a destination via a number of different methods, and it will calculate a route from your current position. Unlike a car satnav, it won’t give you any spoken directions and there’s no 3D view.

Instead, you get a standard 2D top-down view and a clearly marked route (you can even change the colour of the route highlight). There are various options to warn you of turns, but we found the notification of every single upcoming side road a bit odd. As well as automatic route recalculation, you can choose various types of roads to avoid, but make sure that you set the routing to ‘Calculate routes for Bicycle’ rather than Car or Pedestrian.

Another hugely useful feature is courses. Instead of automatically working out a route, the 800 simply directs you around a course you set. This means you can take a particular road – or avoid one – and still get the same turn indications as with the auto-routing mode. There are many websites where you can download courses other people have created, or you can easily create your own. This mode is also great for routes you ride regularly, including circular routes. You can choose to be alerted if you cycle off course, which is handy if you’re whizzing down a hill and miss a turn. Usefully, you can disable route recalculation, preventing the 800 from building a new route if you do go off course.

Training

The 800 allows you to race against yourself, by saving the data from the previous times you cycled a particular route. You can customise the timing screens to show how far or behind you are in terms or time or distance. There’s also a ‘virtual partner’ which you can race against, even if you haven’t ridden the route before. You set the speed at which the partner rides and try and keep up.

Yet another mode is Workouts. Using the Training menu option, you can build Workouts which have multiple ‘steps’. You set a particular goal for each one, be it time, distance, heart rate or something else from the numerous parameters. If you don’t want to build a Workout, you can use the Alerts option for a simpler indication of when you’ve reached a goal, say distance or heart rate. Alerts can also be warnings, so you can set maximum and minimum values for various parameters such as cadence – to warn you if you’re straining too hard up a hill with low cadence, for example.

The 800 isn’t perfect, though. As we’ve mentioned, documentation could be a lot better. There’s a full PDF manual stored in memory, but it isn’t particularly comprehensive: we found better user-generated guides online. Another niggle is that the English language option is US based, not English, so you have to put up with ‘statute, highways and carpool lanes’ instead of ‘imperial, motorways and bus lanes’.

Our other gripe is that there are too many different Garmin applications and websites you have to install and visit to use all the 800’s features. There’s the Communicator Plugin for connecting the 800 to your computer via USB, WebUpdater for updating the firmware, Training Center for analysing your rides, Connect for doing the same online, BaseCamp for planning routes and more. We’d much prefer it if everything was neatly integrated into one application with web links.

Software

Garmin Connect is probably the first tool you’ll use. It uploads your activities to Garmin’s website and does an excellent job of presenting the information in a friendly way. As well as a map showing the route you took, you get graphs showing speed, elevation, heart rate, cadence and temperature. You can set goals, such as cycling a certain distance within the next month, and schedule activities as well. A neat feature is the ability to play back the route in Google Earth. Routes can also be downloaded, so you can challenge friends to cycle your route, or download their courses.

For creating courses, you can try Garmin’s BaseCamp application. This comes with a basemap – the same that’s preloaded onto the basic Edge 800 – but which isn’t much use for plotting routes. If you connect your Edge 800 via USB, BaseCamp can read the more detailed maps – either Discoverer or City Navigator – so you can plan a route using precise roads and paths.

You can import routes with various filet ypes including GPX and KML (the latter used by Google Earth and Maps), and edit the routes from there. Still, we’ve found that websites such as GPSies can be better as they use the OSM Cycle map, which highlights the best routes for cycling, and can automatically plot a sensible route between two points.

Although the Edge 800 is expensive, it does everything a cyclist could want. Plus, its battery lasts long enough for all-day riding. Garmin claims it will last for 15 hours; after three hours of cycling, our unit still had 80 per cent remaining, so we can believe the claim. We’d love to see a firmware update to enable a UK English language option, better documentation and a more integrated analysis / route planning application, but we’ve yet to see a better satnav for cycling. For this reason, it wins an Ultimate award.