Davideo

Got mine yesterday. I had already created a ride at the Hammerhead site, and it automatically loaded to the Karoo. The map display is pretty great. Once I got about 15 miles from home, each street was not shown - only the route. I have since uploaded most of my area maps. That took a while. After that first ride I uploaded to Strava and was able to rename the title (instead of "Afternoon Ride") before uploading. Previously with my Garmin, I would upload to Garmin Connect and it would upload to Strava. When I went to Strava, it showed up as a 0.9 mile ride. Major bummer. I had to manually add a 29 mile ride to keep my mileage correct on Strava. I sent an email list of questions to Hammerhead. My Garmin HR monitor, Garmin cadence and Powertap G3 all connected just fine.

DrIsotope

Yeah, I'm anticipating that my first week or so of rides will be with 2 computers strapped to the bike-- because even though the battery life on the 520 is down to nearly nothing, it has proven pretty reliable... mostly.

WhyFi

Is diminishing battery life a common problem with the 520? Do they have a specified number of recharge cycles?

DrIsotope

Well, every lithium battery has a finite number of charge cycles-- usually by ~300 charges, battery life begins to fall off. My 520 has a bit more than that (I'm guessing) and is down from 15 hours when new to 5 hours now. I don't fault the unit, it's lasted 2.5 years and +1,800 hours of use. My intent had been to hand the 520 down to my wife, who is currently using my handed-down Garmin 500, but the 500 gets 10+ hours per charge without problem.

Still trying to talk myself into sending the 520 in for battery replacement, but I balked at $80 and apparently the cost is now $99.

WhyFi

Got it. Yeah, I guess that I meant 'diminishing more than typical,' but this tells me what I wanted to know, thanks. I'm lucky if my schedule/wife allows more than 8hrs/wk on the bike, so 300 recharge cycles is 4-5 years, conservatively.

Seattle Forrest

I have a Garmin watch, use it to record my riding and other exercise. Now that you can't disable auto-sync, it would be a pain in the ass to have a Gamin Edge; I'd have to delete a duplicate entry each time I go for a ride. That's another reason this is attractive to me. I just want the map, and to show power when I'm doing intervals.

Anybody have a photo of it mounted on the bike?

motosonic

Mine should be here tomorrow!! So excited!!!

pesty

ASK and ye shall receive.

Same units, different bikes. 810 for comparison and because the Karoo is 1/2 baked.

banerjek

This thread reminds me of what I like to call "banerjek's Iron Clad Rule of Development" which states that all products work better before they're released than after...

Seattle Forrest

Thanks @pesty! Those are the first photos I've seen of it "in the wild."

Silvercivic27

I like how Ray Maker basically called it a piece of junk without explicitly calling it a piece of junk. Also, holy huge screen, Batman, may as well strap an iPad to your bars. Does it produce front end lift >25 mph?

WhyFi

Gotta offset that mass somehow.

TimothyH

Based on the DC Rainmaker review, I'm glad I didn't pre-order this thing.

Lots missing and it seems like they pushed this thing out the door extremely early in the development process.

It comes with a Barfly mount and so it has that going for it at least.


-Tim-

Seattle Forrest

I really want to love this device.

It's too big. I can forgive that if it's the only thing wrong with it. Currently, it's not.

I'm not doing that much riding these days, it's xc ski season. So they have until April 2 to get it right.

DrIsotope

There is an ever-growing collection of alarmingly negative armchair analysis in this thread, particularly from the people who didn't buy one. Have none of you ever owned a Garmin device? There is a name for a person who has never had an issue with their Garmin: a person who has never owned one.

To those who actually have bought one, and are nevertheless whinging and whining, guess what? You're an early-adopter. This is what you get. Have you never bought a product early in its development? Have none of y'all never played a video game in alpha, or used anything still in testing/development? This is how it works. Sure, sometimes the road is bumpy-- oh ye of short memories, think back and remember that it took Garmin years to get solid performance out of the Edge 500. The Edge 1000 still doesn't work right 100% of the time, and it's been out for 4 years. It's not as if the device is locked in to what it is-- it's 2018, not 1988. So long as Hammerhead moves forward with continued support, and keeps working toward making the device "just right," I'm willing to be part of the process. Garmin trots out this-years product and hails it as the latest and greatest, while it works like crap for at least a year. Every Garmin buyer is a beta-tester, only they paid full price for the privilege. Hammerhead never made any such claims. Anyone who plunked down their cash is basically part of the dev team, and anyone who didn't doesn't have a dog in the fight.

Lastly, the complaints that "the screen is too big" is one of the most absurd things I've ever seen written down. A "small" screen on a smartphone is now 4.7". Why do we need bike computers with screens the size of postage stamps? Some of us would like to able to put 6-8 data fields on a screen and actually have them legible.

Silvercivic27

I’ve never had a major problem with a Garmin device, and I’ve had 3 bike computers and 2 watches. Maybe I’m the exception? Your diatribe is entertaining, and you’d probably be right if this company didn’t already have a track record of producing total crap that didn’t go anywhere (Hammerhead), which I DID buy and listened to their promises of it NOT being a piece of junk for a long time, but alas, it remained a piece of junk. So yeah. Fool me once, shame on me...fool me twice...nope. You guys can have faith and be the beta testers. I’ll be out riding with something that already works.

Silvercivic27

Also, if I’m part of a dev team...Fine, as long as I’m being PAID, not PAYING full retail price. At that point, I’m working for you, I shouldn’t be paying full price as if it were a finished product.

Steve B.

My Garmin 1000 has been flawless out of the box, my 810 not so much.

WhyFi

So people that decided not to put any skin in the game aren't allowed to criticize, precisely because they don't have any skin in the game, and those that have decided to put skin in the game aren't allowed to criticize because they're early adopters and should know better? IOW, nobody puts Baby in a corner? Okay, got it.

DrIsotope

It's not even illogical, it's just hypocrisy. You've never had an issue with your Garmins, so Garmins are therefore something that "already works." Both of my Garmins have eaten rides, shut down and restarted mid-ride, lost connection to sensors, etc, etc. But that doesn't mean I would run into the street yelling all Garmins are awful and that no one should buy them. They are imperfect devices, and that is where the fundamental difference between Garmin and Hammerhead (at least at this stage) shows through: Garmin forgets. As soon as the new model comes out, the last one may as well have never existed-- I call it the Shimano Method. So long as Hammerhead keeps at it, things will only get better.

Tell that to pretty much everyone who bought an Edge 820, and are just now getting them to work reliably, after countless firmware updates. I just had to do a complete hard reset on my 520 when an auto-downloaded update froze it at the load screen. Now Live Segments don't and won't work. The 520 came out three years ago, and as far as I'm concerned, it is not a "finished product."

Criticizing something you have no practicable knowledge of is misleading at best. Allow me to launch into an epic rant about why you should never buy a Specialized bike, despite having never owned or even ridden one.

On the other hand, as an earlier adopter, and someone who has supported crowd-funded projects in the past, I'm aware of the realities. If being a part of this process isn't what you're looking for, go buy a Wahoo Bolt... so long as you're fully aware of its caveats. Or alternately, drop $600 on an Edge 1030 and work on convincing yourself that it was money well spent. So yes, the people who have plunked down their money should absolutely know better.

Instead, we have the typical BF nonsense-- "car wouldn't start this morning, so I'm going out looking for a horse."

WhyFi

Is that a long-winded way of confirming that I was correct in summarizing your opinion that no one has any business criticizing this product?

Cool.

DrIsotope

No, it was a superfluous effort in highlighting your ignorance. Everyone here has an apparently inalienable right to say everything they want about everything they know nothing about. It's the unwritten code of the internet. What Ray maker did on his site was fair and well balanced. What many of the participants in this thread are doing is yelling to hear the sound of their own voices.

Back on topic, this thread amazingly contains no complaint about the fact that the Karoo doesn't have a speaker. Oh, the humanity!

Silvercivic27

Well, my Garmin works shows that not all Garmins are garbage. If you’re having so much trouble with yours, why do you keep banging your head against the wall? Sell it and get something that works? Doesn’t sound too logical to me!

My main comparison here is that the Hammerhead company has not put out ANYTHING that works. I’m specifically talking about the POS known as H1. At least most of the Garmin stuff works. I get that you’re desperate to find something that works well that’s not a Garmin. I’m just saying that based on the company’s track record this far, I seriously doubt that the Karoo is that something.

WhyFi

So who has the right to criticize, if not those that have one and those that don't have one?

Silvercivic27

Just let him continue to buy junk that doesn’t work. He seems to enjoy that, and vehemently justifying his poor judgement.