Garmin 510

Over the past three years I’ve been a big fan of the Garmin 500 GPS cycling computer. Its easy to use wire-and sensor-free design is a no-brainer and being able to upload and view your rides becomes quite addictive.As handy as the Garmin 500 has been, this sort of device has come under threat from the smartphone. That’s right, those little devices that live in our pockets 24/7 make for fantastic cycle computers. Apps such as Strava and MapMyRide combined with ANT+ enabled cadence and heart rate straps can turn just about any smartphone into a NASA-level training centre.

Garmin is aware of this and they’ve taken the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ approach with their new Edge 510 and 810 models. These new cycling specific devices assume that you have a smartphone, and they are designed to piggyback your smartphone’s capacity to enhance their own function. Both units operate fine without a smartphone, but also sync to your smartphone via Bluetooth and leverage the smartphone’s WiFi to do more with your ride info. Both models are similar in size and appearance; the 810 is slightly larger and has maps, whereas the 510 does not.

With the 510 that we have been using, the basic package sells for $299 (that’s without the optional heart rate and cadence sensors). It’s a slick unit, but is it worth spending the cash when you’ve probably got a device in your pocket that can do much the same thing? Well I’d be stuffed without my smartphone; I’d rate it as more important than my wallet and a much bigger inconvenience to lose. I wouldn’t strap my wallet to my handlebar and go mountain biking and I wouldn’t do it with my virtual life either—no freakin’ way!

Without being connected to your smartphone the 510 is a very effective GPS cycle computer. It uses a touch screen for most on-the-fly functions as well as the menu navigation. There are also traditional buttons for powering up, activating the backlight and starting a ride. At first I found the combination of touch screen and press button functions to be counter intuitive, but once I learnt the functions I didn’t question it again. The press buttons are easy to use and the touch screen worked with regular full-fingered gloves. Overall the 510 is a little bigger than the older 500 but it’s not so big that it becomes intrusive. The screen is large and very clear, although being a touch screen it does tend to get dirt and water smeared over it.

Scrolling through the touch screen options really is a next-level experience and it makes navigating through the menus far easier. This ease of use becomes particularly handy once you delve into the vast array of functions—it’d be overwhelming if you had to rely on the old push-button system.

The big advantage of smartphones, and now the Garmin, is that you don’t need to plug your device into a computer to upload your ride—just download the Garmin Connect app to your smartphone and sync your phone. Complete a ride then save it and it’ll upload it to Garmin Connect via your phone. Voilà! Garmin Connect can also push you weather updates such as storm warnings. This feature could be helpful for those in alpine areas, but it wasn’t worthwhile during a few months of riding in Sydney.

Create a course on the Garmin Connect website or import someone else’s and you can use the 510 as a navigational tool. While there’s no detailed overlay map, it will show the direction that you need to go in and offer audible cues to let you know if you’re heading off course. If you want to use a Garmin for heavy navigation, then the 810 with maps is the device for you.

Wireless & Interactive

Use the Garmin Connect app on your smartphone and you can send an ‘event invite’ email to a friend. This provides a link to your activity via a web-based page that shows progress on a map as you go. You can also publish the invite to Facebook or Twitter if you’re confident that you’ll be riding impressively that day. It can serve as a fantastic safety feature if you’re riding alone and want loved ones to know where you are. Unfortunately I never arrived home to the perfectly timed sound of a beer cap parting with the stem of a frosty bottle, as there is some lag between your real life location and what is displayed on the follower’s screen.

Despite the web connectivity of the 510 the most obvious shortcoming is that the 510 will only communicate with the Garmin Connect app. You can’t record your ride and then send it direct to Strava (for example), it can only go directly to Garmin Connect. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Of course once the ride is uploaded, the data can then be transferred as a GPX file to your chosen social site, but this significantly diminishes the wireless appeal of the 510 and only highlights the convenience of smartphones. Some quick research revealed that it is possible to make the transfer wirelessly but the process is rather convoluted—it’s frustrating given that it could be so much easier if Garmin wanted it to be.

The 510 is really great little device; it’s robust, mounts cleanly to your bars or stem, works with full-fingered gloves, the battery life is much longer than a smartphone and it packs some fun features. Garmin has made the right move by complementing rather than competing with smartphones, although I can’t help thinking that the possibilities of the smartphone/GPS combination were obstructed and underutilised—watch this technology space in the next year or so. In the meantime the 510 will serve as a refined cycle computer if you don’t fancy using your smartphone as a battering ram.

Garmin Australia 1800 235 822 / www.garmin.com