Review on 🚴 Garmin Edge Touring Essential Navigator by Dean Ledet

I have had three different Garmin car units and have loved each one. So I had high hopes for this device. It continues to disappoint. I suspect that's partly because the device is a lot smaller than car devices, so there's a lot less room for storage and processing power I think. The battery life is far from what is advertised. I haven't drained it completely yet, but my longest ride of about eight hours has left it in the single digits, that's less than 8%. This means that it has to be recharged every day on trips lasting several days. The manual is almost useless, not detailed enough, for example to download routes, it says put them in the main folder, that's wrong, you have to put them in a subfolder. It's good that I have friends who understand these things. While following a busy course, he did reasonably well on four of the seven courses. On one he told me to turn left when he should have turned right and after 10 miles he started working again. If he thinks someone is off course, the screen goes black with white letters saying "Off Course" and there's no indication of how to get him back on course. Another great feature is another black screen with white letters indicating that the route is too difficult and waypoints will take a long time to calculate and use. It would be great if someone knew where they are and what waypoints are ahead, but on someone else's downloaded track you don't usually know that. Compared to a Garmin car, it has far fewer points of interest. I wanted to go somewhere, but I didn't have the address or the names of the streets that crossed there, but I knew several shops in the area. I couldn't find any of them. When I was looking for shops in the town where I live, I looked in the shopping department and all there was were a couple of bike shops. Nice but not very helpful when I want something other than a bike shop. The use for navigation also demonstrates some peculiarities. When I first used it, it told me to turn onto any dirt road and driveway I was driving onto that was in the approximate direction I was traveling. It was cured by telling him not to use dirt roads, but why he sent me into the middle of a farm field is still a mystery to me. I could see that most of these roads ended in the middle of the field, they weren't connected to other roads and they weren't shorter. Today I told him to take me home (which I programmed), he told me to turn onto the street two blocks from where I live. It would have worked, but I ignored it and walked on and turned onto my street. Then he wanted me to turn off the street, go two blocks south, one block west, and then two blocks north to get back on my street. It would work but add four blocks to my trip. He chose a route, and hell, I would use that route even if I had to walk two blocks to get back on the route. It's slow to catch up. When you indicate a turn, the triangle indicating the location is around the corner but still indicates the turn. No problem if there aren't multiple turns in a row or if someone looks down and sees a turn instruction without realizing that the turn has already been taken. There were also issues updating maps and software when I received the device. Garmin tech support handled it perfectly after I gave up running it over and over and called them. Turns out I didn't have the latest version of Garmin Express and had to uninstall the old version before my computer could load the newer version. There was a problem with my computer and they did a great job for over an hour taking my screen to fix it. could have found my way to my destination that day. Also he told me to turn and then told me I was off course and told me the course was too hard and got cut off (actually just cut off once) until I touched the screen to go back to the map, for which it usually worked, for which I got it. I was expecting many of these issues having read the available reviews before purchasing. I just hoped Garmin updated the software to fix the issues. They probably are, but they can still do a few updates.