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Looking to replace my Garmin 520 and considering one of these, battery life seems to be a strong selling point.
However last time I read there was no option to follow workouts on them, is this still the case?
Essentially what I do know is create a workout in Garmin Connect, sync to my Edge and follow it outdoors using the workout screen. Would like something similar.
However last time I read there was no option to follow workouts on them, is this still the case?
No - mine auto downloads workouts from TodaysPlan...
Cheers, so I can make my own somewhere (Wahoo app or TrainingPeaks) and upload to the Bolt.
How do you find the interface for following outdoors?
It works well. Counts up to, and through intervals and also you are able to pause the workout if your ride the interval start point is longer than desired yet the Bolt still records the entire ride eg:
10 min warm up <pause as it takes me 15 mins to the bottom of the hill im using>
<unpause>
start interval.
Your are counted in to the intervals and given the relevant guidance - power, hr etc.
Excellent cheers, pause feature is something I always thought the Garmin could do with...
If it's battery life that's the main selling point then the initial noises from DC Rainmaker about the 530's performance look startlingly good… albeit with slightly unrealistic test conditions thus far.
The bolts battery is ace, the Garmin will die quickly no doubt
The Bolt is good, manages 14 hours nicely enough. According to Ray's first test, the Roam managed 18 hours. The 530 had 41% left in the tank after 24 hours…
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2019/05/random-things-did-this-weekend-93.html
Like I say, not an entirely representative scenario, but still…
Does look pretty impressive, any of those would be plenty of battery life for my use.
Currently getting around 4 or 5 hours on my 520, although it's been a bit colder of late which seems to have an impact (not sure whether this is a thing or not).
I have a long ride this weekend and I'm doubtful it will last the distance, although I'm hoping to squeeze a bit more out of it by disabling Bluetooth (PM is Ant+)
OP if you want to see the intervals - I went out earlier and took some screen shots for you but am having issues getting them on here. If you want them, PM me your email address and I'll send them to you.
Having used an Elemnt Bolt since I think May time last year I've just ordered the new Garmin 530 to replace it.
Having used an Elemnt Bolt since I think May time last year I’ve just ordered the new Garmin 530 to replace it
Any particular reason?
I've got the bolt , been using it for a few months . It is the simplest , clearest most long lasting computer I've had. I think it's excellent.
Although yeah it's good being able to tweak it and set it all up on the phone I then find it really annoying when I want to change something while I'm actually riding and have to dig my phone out. Because you dont have 'profiles' you then dont have a quick way of altering the settings. For example on my road bike I display cadence on the map screen so that I make sure I'm at a good RPM but when i navigate off road I dont need to see cadence but I can't change it because it means getting my flipping phone out each time. Same with the workout screen I would like it different per bike without having to change it then and there.
Off road navigation is flippin' rubbish too, not only the fact the maps are black and white but also the fact you can't put OS maps on it which are better and you can't move around on the map. Personally when I'm navigating on my mtb I like to look ahead and think right I'll be taking a left in a while but all you can do is zoom in and out but not move at all around.
Last but not least I have three weeks in whistler soon and like to go and ride in the tweed valley both of which hugely use trailforks and the map data for this is embedded on the unit plus you can import plotted routes from trailforks too.
Probably won’t use navigation (would maybe go for the Roam for that) but would agree profiles would be nice.
I wouldn’t change on the fly but would like different set ups between racing, just riding etc.
Cheers 👍
I really rate my bolt
Garmin’s software is one of the main reason I’ll never buy a Garmin again
On the bolt you can zoom in and out which reduces / increases the windows on the display. I have one screen with six metrics - zoom in using the bolts buttons and suddenly i have watts only in the display.
E.g. for marathon racing i usually have watts, hr and distance access merely by 3 button presses to zoom in.
The bolt will do turn by turn directions if you use one of several route planners, such as ride with GPS. It can then give you distance to next cue and you can see you are approaching a junction, rather than just seeing the route turn a corner. The bolt is great for navigating a pre-planned route, its shortcoming is if you divert off the route it doesn't recalculate a way back, just shows you which direction to head. However, your smartphone is there if you need to plan a different way and thats ten times easier than trying to peer at a tiny GPS screen.
Unless you're navigating off road in which case it wont provide you any cue's....as I said. It works fine for on road navigation plotted with ridewithgps (no turn by turn with strava) but anything off road and it's pretty poor. I'm looking forward to having talky toaster maps back!
Both the above are partially true.
The way the Bolt (and Elemnt) work is that they rely on cue points. They don't generate turn-by-turn directions (so they don't support TBT navigation in the strict sense) because in terms of the both map and the route they have no concept of a turn.
Cue points have to be included with the route you download to the device. So if you planned your route on RWGPS, say, and you planned it on roads with the "generate cue points" option checked, then you'll get those cues. All it's doing is popping up whatever information is in that cue when you get close to it.
But there are lots of occasions when you don't get those cues. A recorded GPX file, for instance, or routes from applications which don't generate cues—often including off-road ones.
You can add cues manually in planner such as RWGPS, though, and occasionally that's better than using the generated ones: you get to choose to include only those where you might need some advice; you might choose not to have a cue whenever you go straight on at a junction, for instance.
As above, though, if you go off-route with a Bolt/Element the whole experience goes sour pretty quickly.
Not relating to the OP's comments about workouts on the Bolt, as I don't use it for that yet.
Just a few general observations that might not be picked up on reviews....
As above - no profiles. I just assumed it would have them. On my Edge500 I had 3 profiles set-up for different bikes - mainly as they were used for different things.
The reality is it makes little difference to me in real-world use, but it would have been nice to have the options.
Turning the backlight on in the dark is a bit of a pain. On the Edge500 briefly pressing the power button would get the backlight on for the pre-set time. On the Bolt, a brief press of any button turns on the backlight, but they all change something - so there is no way to turn the backlight on without changing a screen - admittedly this means that you could for example just press the power button (to take you to settings) and then press it again to return to where you were; this gives you the backlight and is only two presses of the same button. But, it's just a bit crap there's no specific way of just turning on the backlight. It's something that has been highlighted many times on the forums as a 'can we have?'...
While the mount is almost the same as the Garmin, I don't like the way it only works one way. It's only a small issue, but the Garmin mount works clockwise or anti-clockwise, so you just know to put the device in 90degrees out & twist it - it doesn't matter which way. With the Bolt, it seems to take me much longer to get it mounted.
Only other 'glitch' and first software issue I have had with the device was last weekend. It failed to get a GPS lock and just sat there saying 'acquiring GPS'. I powered down the device after a few mins & re-started it but got the same thing.
As a last resort, I got my phone out and used the companion app. This sorted it out and it immediately went from 'acquiring gps' to 'poor gps' and then within 10 seconds that disappeared & had a full lock.
I've not used it since to know if this was a one-off.
And I know there have been reports on here of the companion app absolutely ruining phone battery life - I left it on for that ride & did about 2hrs 10. That only used 10% of my phone battery and I also had location sharing turned on in Google Maps. But, my phone does have a large battery - 5000mAh.
I thought I'd miss profiles when I moved over from Garmin, but I've just set up the home screen so I can zoom in & out depending on what kind of riding I'm doing.
Agree that the navigation isn't as good as Garmin, but I've found it to be OK if I plan something in RWGPS in advance. For me the trade-off was worth it for the reliability (my previous was a Garmin 810 that was fairly flakey).
I've looked at the pre-loaded Team Sky workouts to see how the workout screen looks - seems decent, with countdowns and beeps when you'd want them. I haven't found a free way to get workouts on it since I dropped trainingpeaks (although I admit I didn't look very hard).