TOUR test rider Michael Bongartz gets on his bike and taps his desired destination into the GPS device on the stem. After a short calculation time, an arrow appears on the display and a voice tells him where to go. After just a few kilometres, he stops. "Luckily I was travelling on my cross bike," says Bongartz, "otherwise I wouldn't have been able to complete the route." Although he deselects gravel paths when entering his destination, the VDO GP7 sends him there several times. And Bongartz is not the only TOUR tester to experience a bumpy surprise with the automatic navigation.
This automatic navigation, known as routing, is one of three tasks that five test subjects faced in the TOUR assignment. The other two: downloading a track file of a twelve-kilometre route from the Internet onto the test devices and following it. They also recorded a new track during the ride and downloaded it to their PC at home. None of the testers had any experience with GPS - apart from using the sat nav in the car. We wanted to know: How well and how quickly do they get to grips with the most important functions of GPS devices? Are the functions easy to understand or do you often have to leaf through the operating instructions? With the exception of the Falk Ibex 30, all test devices are also suitable for training management and measure heart rate and cadence, lap times and calories burned. For this test, however, we were only interested in navigation.
The test results of these GPS devices with routing function can be found below as a PDF download:
Falk Ibex 30
Garmin Edge 800
VDO GP7
Xplova G5
Downloads:
download
