[Closed] Wahoo bolt?

I picked up a Elemnt Bolt just before XMas direct from Wahoo for £169. Was the cheapest I could find. Don’t seem to be discounted much at all.

My element bolt just works. No drama.

That would convince me, doesn’t look like the deals on anymore though 🙁

Pm'd you

Do people feel it's better than a garmin 520plus

I have a Bolt that I won in a competition - it's brilliant. But if I was buying one, I might go for the bigger screen on the Elemnt.

I have the bolt. Great bit of gear. Super easy to set up with a QR code. Battery life is really good.

I bought one, used it for a month, sold it and went back to Garmin.

The main killer for me was that it wouldn't automatically connect with my phone so that I'd receive messages whilst riding, which was a big part of why I bought it.

Also worth noting that the navigation on the Bolt is fundamentally much more limited than the Garmin. The Bolt can't calculate a route for you, it just draws a pre-defined route on a screen, and gives you a pre-programmed prompt as you approach (and I found the timing of the turn prompts pretty useless). Most of the time this doesn't make a huge different, but it means it's much less helpful at a complex junction, and can't help you if you need to re-route for any reason.

Coming from an old Edge 800, I found that the inability to pan the map was a real limitation when navigating and needing to check the route. The same is true of the 520 Plus (non-touchscreen) which is a shame as the touchscreen on an Edge 820 is lousy.

The final thing that pushed me over the edge with the Bolt is that it has no concept of "profiles". There's no way to have different data pages for different bikes (you can add more pages with different stuff on, but you've then got more pages to scroll past as you can only scroll one way).

I'm now on an Edge 820. I'd struggle to really recommend it, but for me it's the best of a bad lot.

Navigation
Strava
Long battery for ultra distance rides?

Navigation is a mixed bag (essentially it’s just breadcrumb navigation plus whatever cue points your route planning tool produces; the map is cosmetic only); Strava integration is probably good (don’t use it myself but I’d expect Wahoo to do alright on that front); battery life is good (14 hours) but not game-changingly so. Both the Elemnt and the Bolt had fatal flaws for me; I find the new Garmin Explore suits me nicely. YMMV.

I have a Garmin 810, which would crash mid segment, crash mid ride, freeze, all on the latest firmware.

It was intermittent, when it behaved it was flawless, then on bad days, i'd deploy the phone and stitch the ride together afterwards.

Bought a Bolt which crashed for the first time on boxing day in a year, firmware update to a very recent update and its a known issue and fixed apparently.

Bar that, Bolt has been amazing, prefer the screen, much better live segments, very sharp large display, great LEDs for showing current power zone, routes are ok but you need to plot on a map creator which gives cues, ie. not strava.

So I still use my Garmin for route following probably once a month in summer, as find the strava route builder way superior to others, but bar that Bolt hands down.

If I had to have only 1, the bolt again, and i'd perservere with the bad UI on komoot etc.

I’d say it depends where navigation is on your priority list. I’ve had the 810 and 520, both of which had numerous issues. Have gone to the Bolt and for 12 months it just works.
But the Bolt isn’t good for following the map, if I need to follow a route I’m back on a Garmin etrex 35.

Bummer. Quite fancy having decent mapping. Especially off-road. Sounds like none of them are great at this.

Great replies, thanks... sounds like we are all after something that doesn’t actually exist! Why has no company got it together to make a good nav system that doesn’t crash?
I’m currently using my suunto traverse watch, good Sträva compatability for recording routes, ok breadcrumb nav and about 8hrs batt on gps
Starting to think that wahoo isn’t going to be £200 better than what I already have!