Garmin Edge 705 Review
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On Monday I took possession of my latest toy, err, training device. It is a Garmin Edge 705
cycle computer, heart rate monitor, GPS navigator, device which was originally announced back in August 2007. There have been several delays in the actual release of this product, from Dec '07 to Feb '08. It was finally made available in the US at the end of Feb '08 to a single online store Rei.com. It seems that they paid or persuaded Garmin to allow them sole rights to 605 and 705 for a month before shipping to other online stores. Rei had a mistake on their website which allowed for a 20% discount to be applied to the 705, despite a policy of no discounts on GPS devices. The 705 had been entered in as a bike computer. Unfortunately their shipping to Australia was very high so I didn't bother to take advantage of this discount. I originally had the Garmin ordered from Geomangear who were quoting a 28th Feb shipping date (as were most online stores) and had pre-payed for their order so should have been one of the first to receive theirs. That date came and went and there was no sign of their 10 backordered 705's being shipped. I stumbled across trisports.com who had changed their shipping date to 28th March and also had a 15% discount running the day I looked. I cancelled my geoman order (even made $18 on currency fluctuations) and ordered one from trisports and waited the 5 days to the 28th to see what would happen. On the 27th I was disappointed to see that they had changed their shipping date to 4 April (subsequently changed to 10th April). However I got a surprise when I got an email from trisports on the morning of the 28th with a tracking number for FEDEX . My Garmin had been shipped. I buy a lot of stuff, mostly camera gear, so it takes a bit to get me excited about new gadgets, but this was something different and I was genuinely excited to get it in my hands. FEDEX did a great job, shipped in the US on Friday morning Australian time, I had it in my hands by 10am on Monday. There are 3 versions of the Garmin Edge 705 as well as a 605 and pricing is roughly:
OK, now to the unit itself... Where to start? This unit does pretty much everything: normal bike computer stuff like speed, max speed, ave speed, cadence etc. and then cool stuff like altitude gained, heart rate (max, average), power, GPS locating, auto route selection with alerts for turns, street maps, data recording, course recording, virtual training partner, auto lap timing and so on. I haven't worked it all out yet. The box contains:
The head unit can be mounted on your handle bars or on your stem. The mount that it slides into can be configured to take it in either location. The mount is held on with zip ties. The underside of the mount is rubberised to help prevent movement. The head unit is quite big, it has to be to display maps of a useful size, so I have it mounted on the stem to keep it out of the way. The whole front of my training bike it getting a bit busy, what with the garmin, my ayup headlights and battery back all on the stem.  On my race bike, that will be the end of the setup. 705 on the stem and that is it. On my training bike I have also installed the cadence sensor. The GPS can do speed with out the sensor, but will preferentially use the sensor for accuracy. Wheel diameter can be auto calibrated using the GPS. The cadence sensor mounts on the non drive side chain stay such that a magnet on the left hand crank passes the sensor, and a magnet on the wheel passes on the other side. Setup was pretty easy and took about 5 minutes. Again, it is secured with cable ties with rubber under the sensor unit. The cable ties supplied with the unit are rather large and thick. I'll change them out with thinner ones soon.  If you have a compatible power meter you can also hook this up to the 705. I don't have a power meter so haven't looked into this. Unit Setup The unit has several display screens. There are 2 screens which are each capable of displaying 8 data point, 4 rows with 2 columns. Then there is the map display page, and then the altitude history page. If you are using the GPS to direct you somewhere, there are 2 additional displays, one with step by step directions and another showing a compass and your bearing. On my first data screen I have it showing 7 pieces of data, speed at the top by itself then HR, cadence, ride time, ride distance, ave speed, ave hr. I found 8 data points to be too much so made it like a normal bike computer with speed prominent in a row of its own.  My 2nd data screen also has speed at the top and then some lap info and max speed and % grade and total ascent. Total info overload but pretty handy.  The map screen can also have data points on it but I have chosen not to shrink the map display any further. I didn't buy the unit solely for its mapping ability and don't have any real need for it when riding around Brisbane. It will however be used when I spend a month in Italy in May where I will have no idea where I'm going. I find the map screen hard to see as I haven't worked out the best zoom level yet. The screen and resolution (176 x 220) is pretty small compared to the car GPS units, which is why I have a hard time with it.  The altitude history chart is pretty cool for seeing the profile of the ground you have covered. You can change the scale both vertically and horizontally, but I haven't read the manual on how to scroll around when you zoom right in.  Usage There are 5 heavily rubberised buttons on the sides of the unit, 2 on the front as well as a joystick. The joystick works very well, much better than those crappy mobile phone ones. Overall the 705 is built very well and feels solid. I guess the weight is a fair bit more than your normal bike computer but not excessive (106g). The back of the unit has a covered 4pin USB port for PC connectivity and charging. The USB port has a rubber cover which pushes into the port to weather seal it. I'm not sure how well it seals. I have heard of at least one Garmin 305 suffering from water damage as a result of it getting in during heavy rain. There is also another well sealed slot of a micro-SD card. I bought a mini-SD card as I'm sure that is what I read it took, lucky it was only $9. The screen is big and flat, which means that it tends to catch the glare, making it hard to see during the day. As it is sitting flat on the bar stem it catches a lot of light. I put a PDA screen protector in it as they not only protect the screen from scratches, but tend to cut down the reflexiveness just a little. It's a lot better now. The mount also comes with a 'chock' that raises the front of the unit up, angling it towards the rider. This also helps greatly in reducing that glare. The unit has backlighting which can be adjusted, I had it set to 15% the other night and it looked great. During the day you would need to adjust it higher to overcome the glare. Pressing any button operates the backlight for a predetermined period. Minimum is 15 seconds. Default is actually 0% backlight which resets every time you turn the unit off. The base maps are pretty crap, without the proper Garmin maps the mapping system would be pretty useless. I think that the base maps are what is on the older 205 and 305 units. I've uploaded full detailed maps and they work well. If you didn't want to fork out for the garmin maps, there are several free options for Australia, including shonkymaps and someone made up some other topographic maps as well. My first decent ride with the 705 with all things up and running was to go and do a few reps of Mt Cootha. The 705 has the ability to do autolaps, whereby you press lap once and after than the GPS works out when you pass that point again a new lap is started. On this ride I didn't have it setup properly so the autolap feature didn't work. I did it manually so my laps were a little different each time. I was also waiting for someone else at the top of each climb so I was stopping the timer as well. On one occasion I think I started the timer again when I was a bit of a distance down the road. This resulted in a maximum speed of 95kph as the GPS noticed I had suddenly changed position. I also did a ride where I exported a route from Mapsource to the 705 (to my local bike shop). Autoroute on the 705 would have taken me on roads I didn't want to use so I did it myself in mapsource. Every time I passed a waypoint created in Mapsource, there were a few as I traced a route along the bike path, the garmin would beep at me. This became annoying very quickly as it took me from my data page back to my map page and left me there. I'm going to see if there is a workaround for that. Autoroute would probably produce many less waypoints and it wouldn't be such an issue. The GPS is highly sensitive and it picks up the required satellites quickly. It even works in my bedroom to a certain degree. It is much faster at acquiring satellites than my car GPS. Update: I did a race on the weekend around a 1.2km circuit and despite being out in an open area and no clouds, I had 'poor' GPS receiption and so my GPS location was a bit off on occasions. This resulted in some laps being shorter than others as I didn't have the speed and cadence sensor on my race bike I've also decided that this device isn't all that handy for every day navigation due to the limited screen resolution. It's Ok for setting up a route and getting directed somewhere, but the other day I was riding along some unfamiliar roads, I knew where I was going, but wanted to see street names etc. The screen res is too small to show street names utill you are right at a corner (if at all). You can set several levels of detail that is displayed on the maps, but increasing this brings up more useless info such as school and park names. I've not yet had a go at the virtual trainer. This is where you setup one of your recorded rides as a training course and have to keep up with your previous ride. Software The garmin can be used with Garmin training center. This downloads all your data from the 705 to your PC so you can analyse it.  It's pretty cool as you can use the Mapsource maps to plot your ride on as well as see charts of all your stats. You can output the ride to Google Earth, the route is plotted with a point each time a data point was recorded. If you click on the datapoint it brings up all your stats for that point. My .kml file is here. (1.4MB despite deleting a whole bunch of laps, they are probably still in the file) There is also other software available that does similar thing, some think better. One of those is Sportstracks. Seems pretty good from the short play I've had with it. There is also a Garmin owned website (motionbased.com) which has even better analysis of your data. My ride has been uploaded to motionbased. It defaults to imperial units to click the blue button on the right to switch to metric. There are some pretty good analysis tools on here and you can share your rides with others. |