garmin edge 800 initial road test – out of the box.

box turned up today, my little garmin had found it’s way to my house.  i will give a road test as i use it more, but here are the first impressions.  it basically looks like the love-child of an edge 500 and an edge 705.  size is somewhere in between, but styled like the 500 (got mum’s looks).  there is a wizard to set up the initial info, like units and your personal data.  then you just stand outside till it finds some satellites.  all done and ready to go. 

oh, did i mention that it is all a touch screen interface???  well besides a power, lap and start button, it is all touch.  the touch seems different to an iphone as it seems a little softer.  nothing wrong, just different.  once in the map screen, you can just slide it along like a smartphone, which is pretty cool.

if you have used an edge before then the rest of the setup is pretty straight forward.  bike names, sizes, sensors etc are all pretty standard.  the big upgrade is that you now have 3 personalised screen for holding the basic data and each of them can show 10 different pieces of info.  complete overload, but as an engineer, i need to see data.

maps as usual were the crappiest thing that you could even call a map.  there is a shape that you could roughly call australia, and a marker for perth, but don’t expect much more than that.  what gets me is that you can buy a cheap gps for you car and pay less that $200 for it and it will have a complete map set loaded in.  for these devices, that you pay a lot more for, the maps are an extra $195.  could you imagine if they charged extra for the maps in car gps devices.  no-one would buy them.  however, this is where the internet is your friend.  now, i am not talking about illegal downloads.  there is a website which has open source maps.  this is where people go out with their gps’ and map areas to upload to the site.  after a while you have an almost complete map of the area.  this also works for the edge 705, so if you want a map, you can download them here.

so i am pretty much ready to go.  will let you know how it goes once i hit the road.