Review on 🚴 Enhance Your Cycling Adventures with the Garmin Edge 500 Cycling GPS by Michael Skerving

I bought this to replace my Garmin Forerunner 305. I've taken it to the US, Australia and New Zealand. It's an improvement over the 305 in every way aside from one thing, and it does a great job. Here's one thing: Garmin's product management department, in a fit of divine inspiration, decided to remove a feature from the 500 that was present on the 305 in order to boost Edge 800 sales: auto-map. With 305, you can press a few keys and get a string of characters showing where you've been since you last turned on the device. When driving through unfamiliar terrain, this feature can be a real boon, as it shows you exactly which direction you're going and helps you retrace your steps. For some reason they ripped out all the automappings. You're either running a preloaded course or you don't have a map. lame. If you don't factor in that dissatisfaction, this is a wonderful device. I use it as an iPhone hitter of sorts because using the iPhone as my primary GPS tracker with the always-on display would fry the battery. This is what the Edge 500 offers me: a permanent, irreversible record of my location throughout the day. A trip timer that tells me how long I've been on the bike. My speed and time, in easy-to-read numbers, always at a glance. How far did I ride in one day. And as a bonus, a rough estimate of the altitude above sea level and the ambient temperature. I don't have to push any buttons to read these things, they're just there. Additionally, the device syncs quickly with offline software like Ascent or Rubitrack, charges quickly, and has an impressively secure swivel mount for my steering wheel. And the battery life is excellent. I turned this thing on in the morning, rode my bike 80 miles, then went to bed and reminded myself to turn it off and still found it happy when I got up in the morning, with a timer set to 18+. Watch. Let's see how the iPhone does it. Of course, the iPhone and other smartphones have put Garmin in a pretty awkward position. They think they need to "catch up" by adding smartphone-like features. Color, big, thick touchscreens, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and more. All of these things add bulk, decrease battery life, and make it more difficult to use. In my opinion, the Edge 500 is the pinnacle of Garmin design and it's been downhill since then.