Wahoo Elemnt Roam

Wahoo's Elemnt Roam is a good GPS unit for a range of riding. It's compact enough to not look out of place on your best road bike and it packs in enough mapping capability to cope with some pretty big adventures. There's room for improvement, but it's a likeable unit overall. Whether it's worth the uptick over the standard Elemnt for the extra functionality is maybe a more nuanced question, and for me it's probably not doing enough over and above to justify the extra cost.

• Pros: Easy to set up and use, clear display, good smartphone integration, friendly interface
• Cons: Lag switching to map screen, re-routing on device patchy, colour not used enough, sometimes hard to use without phone

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We had a brief look at the Roam when it came in, and Jack made this video, with an awful pun in it...

The unit itself is business-card-sized at 85x55mm, although obviously it's a bit deeper. It's more or less exactly the same size as the Garmin Edge 830, and it uses the same quarter-turn mount, albeit rotated 90 degrees.

In the box you get Wahoo's own out-front mount that has a nice integrated look when the computer's in place; it'll work with pretty much any Garmin stem mount that mounts with O-rings, or any out-front mount that has a mounting plate you can rotate. If you have a one-piece mount that won't rotate then Wahoo offers a mount adaptor to make it work. There's a locking screw on the Wahoo mount to secure the computer. 'When utilized, the Elemnt Roam may remain on the bicycle for weigh-ins for UCI races,' it says. So that's a useful feature for all of us choppers.

The screen isn't touch-sensitive so there are plenty of hardware buttons: three on the front, one on the left-hand side and two on the right.

There are LEDs up the left side of the unit and across the top that can be used for various things depending on your setup.

Setup: Easy peasy

Setting up the Roam was simplicity itself. Get the app on your phone and pair with the head unit: it just displays a QR code on the screen and you snap it with your phone, and that's that. You can set up all your personal metrics and then customise the data screens you want. The Roam uses a similar interface as other Elemnt computers here. You can configure up to 11 data fields on a page, and using the zoom buttons on the right hand side of the unit you can display more or less of them as you choose. It's a really nice, intuitive interface and it means you have to do a lot less legwork setting up the screens that you want.

Pairing sensors (Bluetooth and ANT+ are available) is easy enough too. You can display them all on the app, and connect to the ones you want, although I found that the wifi settings on the phone sometimes interfered with the process. You can, in theory, pair sensors via the unit directly if the app won't do it. Except you can't, because it doesn't really work, or at least didn't for me. You're supposed to hold the computer near the sensor and it'll pick it up, but if there are multiple sensors it tends to get confused.

Through the app you can also get the Roam to display phone notifications if that's a thing you want (I don't, generally) and you can sync it with all sorts of third-party portals (Strava, Ride With GPS, Best Bike Split, Komoot, MTB Project, SingleTracks) to get access to the routes you've created there. Strava Live Segments are also available if you're a Strava Summit kind of a person.

The app is pretty integral to the Roam experience, so it's good that it works as well as it does. Integration is excellent, activity upload is seamless, route selection easy. You'll only ever need to plug the Roam in for charging.

Screen: Good, but colour is under-used

Wahoo has used a colour 2.7in screen for the Roam which is one of the major updates from the standard Elemnt. It's not a colour screen like your phone, more a colour screen like your Game Boy: it's 8-colour LCD technology and there's a limited colour palette to choose from. Okay, it's much better than a Game Boy screen, but you know what I mean. Or possibly not, if you're under 40. Anyway.

As a functional device for looking at basic maps and numbers, the screen is extremely sharp and clear. It's easily legible in all conditions from bright sunlight to (with the backlight) the middle of the night. For the majority of riding you'll never need the backlight, which means that battery life is preserved for other stuff. There's an ambient light sensor that fires up the backlight when it's needed.

Of all the GPS screens I've used it's probably the clearest, if not maybe the most beautiful. The Hammerhead Karoo screen is nicer, but functionally not really any better for the job, and you need to use the backlight a lot more. Like the Hammerhead, the Roam uses a screen with a matt finish instead of a gloss one, and that really helps to make the screen legible in changing riding conditions, for example when you're moving in and out of tree cover.

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However, if you're going to fit a colour screen, maybe use the colour for some of the things you display? On the data screens, all the data fields are black. On mapping, main roads are yellow, and if you happen to live near a body of water then that's blue, but all minor roads are black. The elevation profile is black. Your position marker is black. The compass is black. The route you're following is black. Your recorded trail is black. The turn by turn instructions are black…

I'd say that about half the time I was riding away from main roads, there wasn't any colour on the screen at all. It's not like I want everything to be a psychedelic mass of colour, but since you've gone to the trouble of fitting a colour screen you might as well make some use of it. Maybe a bit more variation on the maps? Maybe a red north arrow on the compass? Maybe show the gradient in red when you're going up and green when you're going down? That kind of thing. It's not hard to think of ways it could be used to improve the experience.

Route following: Simple and effective

I used the Roam to follow routes from the sensible to the ridiculous. Its sternest test was a DIY 600km audax where I was relying entirely on the computer for route-finding. I created the route in Strava (split into nine sections), synced them with the Wahoo app on my smartphone, and pushed them to the unit one by one as I inched my way round. My only issue was that I'd named them all the same and put the number at the end, and the Roam screen didn't display enough characters to include the number, so there was a bit of guesswork picking the right one at times.

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But other than that, it was excellent. The route is easy to follow on the map as a line of chevrons, the turn instructions are clear and sensible, and you can use the quick look LEDs across the top of the unit as a visual cue for upcoming turn instructions. Overall, the experience was pretty seamless until 540km in, when the Roam crashed. I reset it and it recovered the route; It took a while but it was fine after that. I chatted to Wahoo about it and they said that subsequent firmware updates might have addressed the problem, but since I wasn't about to cycle 600km again in a hurry I don't actually know whether they did.

The elevation profile on the Roam is especially useful, giving you an easy-to-follow visual representation of what's coming up on the route. Once you get to grips with the scale of the thing you can gauge fairly accurately how long and how hard a climb is going to be. I made a lot of use of that on the 600km audax and it prepared me for the B3081 out of Bruton that might well have finished me off (mentally if not physically) if I hadn't seen it coming.

What kind of route information you get on your route depends to an extent on how you generate it. If you do it on the head unit or the companion app then you get everything: elevation, street names, distance to turns. If your route is from Strava then elevation is there but street names aren't. Other portals will send over some combination of route, turn points, turn-by-turn information and elevation data.

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One major issue I did have is that the map screen is very laggy: when you're switching to the map there's often a delay of a couple of seconds before it renders. The recessed buttons on the front of the Roam that you use to toggle between displays aren't the most positive-feeling buttons ever, so on occasion on the 600km ride – scratch that – about A HUNDRED TIMES I pressed the button again thinking I hadn't pressed it, and it went past the map screen to the next screen, and I had to scroll round again. As you might imagine, that didn't exactly fill me with the joys of spring, especially 580km in. I think the amount of delay is partly down to how much data you've already recorded, partly down to how long a route you're trying to display. Anyway, it's unacceptable on a £300 computer, even if I was pushing its limits. Fix it.

Other routing functions: Some useful, some a bit patchy

One of the selling points of the Roam is that the computer is capable of re-routing you on the unit. Say you've planned a route and the road you've picked is closed, or turns out to be not a road at all? If you just keep on riding, in theory the Roam will pick you another route to take you back onto your planned route further down the line.

I say 'in theory' because I've found in practice the re-routing sometimes works okay, and sometimes doesn't. If there's a nice, obvious road route to a point a little bit further on then generally the Roam picks it out okay. Things start to go wrong when the re-route isn't as obvious, or you're off track for an extended period of time. The Roam suffers from the same fundamental issue that I've had with many other route-following units and apps in the past: it just doesn't seem to be clever enough to look far enough along the planned route and pick a sensible alternative based on where you've got to. There's a lot of going back the way you came, or taking a huge diversion to re-join the route a few hundred metres from where you left it, when you could much more sensibly rejoin a lot further along.

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The logic seems to be 'How can I get back to the route?' and not 'What's now the best route to the destination, given where I am?'. From experience, after a while I didn't trust it to make the best decision, and instead just zoomed out the map view until I could see where I was in relation to what I'd planned, and made my own decisions at junctions. That worked fine, and it's fairly easy to control the map view to do that.

Like people to know where you are? You can also broadcast your position to your loved ones, or all and sundry, using the Wahoo Live Track facility. It's similar to Strava's Beacon and Garmin and Lezyne's live track offerings except, in my experience, it didn't work as well as any of them. The map is slow to load and slow to update. It's usable, but it's not a highlight.

Other routing functions include a route back to start option, that will get you back to where you came from with a minimum of fuss. It works quite well, and generally picked similar routes to what I would have used if I'd been finding the way by myself. There's an option to route to the start too, which also works well. You can retrace your route too, though you don't get turn-by-turn instructions for that.

There are a couple of other additional routing functions: you can save locations to the Roam and navigate to them; you can also scroll around on the screen of the device to find a location to ride to, and the Roam will get you there. They're nice-to-haves, but I'm not quite sure of the reasoning behind adding functionality that's entirely head-unit-based when realistically you're always going to have your phone with you when using this computer, because it just works better that way. They might get you out of a hole if you were lost and your phone died, I suppose, but assuming your phone is still operational it's always going to be easier to do stuff like that on the phone and send it to the Roam rather than delve into the menus or click about on the cursors.

So for road riding, the Roam doesn't really represent a major step forward for me. There are some mountain bike routing collaborations that might make it more useful for off-road adventures than the standard Elemnt is, but those are a bit beyond the scope of a road-based review.

Trainer control: It's there if you want it

The Roam can control your ANT+ FE-C smart trainer, should you want it to. It's especially capable with Wahoo's own trainers, of course; for example you can re-ride a route in your history and the Roam will send gradient information to the trainer to simulate the hills. While there are some scenarios where you could find this connectivity handy – maybe you use your Tacx Neo to warm up at races and it'd be handy to control it from your head unit – it's a pretty niche use case, really. If you've splurged hundreds (or thousands) of pounds on a smart trainer you're probably going to have invested in a Zwift/Sufferfest/Trainerroad/etc subscription to make the most of it.

Battery life: Not quite as good as advertised, but still good

Wahoo claims that the Roam battery is good for up to 17 hours of riding. Normally such claims are very much a best-case scenario, and that's the situation here. In normal use, with sensors connected and a phone paired, I was getting about 12 hours out of the head unit. That's still pretty good, and clearly you're covered for most day rides there. If you're planning to be out longer than that then chances are you're packing a backup battery anyway.

It's a pity the Roam hasn't moved to USB-C so you can shove more charge into it during a cafe stop, but having said that I never struggled to keep it charged during my 38-hour audax. The position of the charge port isn't really conducive to charging on the go.

Overall: It's good, but not a real step change

At £300 the Roam is competing with the Garmin Edge 830 and 530 units, and the excellent Sigma ROX 12.0, amongst others. The enhanced routing capabilities are a bit of a draw but the colour screen doesn't bring a great deal to the party right now. That may well change with future firmware updates.

As it stands, if it was me I'd probably opt for the standard Elemnt. I don't use the on-device routing enough to miss it, and I don't really trust the re-routing to do a consistent job. Routing to the start, retracing and getting home are useful functions but not must-haves, and the following of routes on the Elemnt is capable enough that I wouldn't be forking out the extra for the new Roam.

It might feel, reading this review, that it's a long list of things that didn't quite work properly, but for the most part the Roam worked extremely well and it's a likeable thing to use on a day to day basis. The app is better than any other manufacturer's companion app, and the unit itself does a lot of things well. Overall it's a thumbs-up, but there are still improvements that could be made to improve the experience.

Verdict

Easy-to-use, fully equipped GPS with excellent routing capabilities, but not without its issues