Meilan Navihood L1

The Meilan Navihood L1 is a pretty likeable GPS with reasonable navigation and a clear display. There's no touchscreen and the controls can be unintuitive, however, and even at this price there's strong competition – especially as our test unit didn't live up to its IPX7 waterproofing claim.

> Buy now: Meilan Navihood L1 for €149.99 from Amazon  

GPS units like this are so complex their reviews are often longer than most rides, but the short version is this: while it's fundamentally pretty good for the price, the Navihood's waterproofing is suspect and it can be randomly confusing.

The first bit is easy to explain, so let's start there. Meilan says this is rated to IPX7, which means it can safely spend 30 minutes in a metre of water, and certainly the bolted caseback and chunky rubber bung for the charging port look appropriate to that.

However, the first bout of heavy rain saw the screen of this one fog up from the inside. This condensation repeatedly returned on subsequent rides, and while its functionality appears unaffected so far, water and electronics mix like Elon Musk and advertisers. Just be aware you may have to sue the rain for falling.

Dampness aside – this test unit could have a unique issue – as a simple live readout and basic stat recorder, the L1 is good, and if you like your sensors it offers Bluetooth and ANT+ connections. It starts up rapidly, it's easy to start recording or stop and save your data, and the screen is easy to read. For the most part it just gets on with displaying your chosen data fields, but there are times when it gets confusing.

For instance, as the sun set on one ride I wanted to switch the backlight on, but struggled – I had to press two buttons in a row to make it work, almost like the first one was a shift key. But on the next ride, just pressing one button worked... which, it turns out, is how it was supposed to be all along. Perhaps the water affected it after all. I've also had the units switch themselves from imperial to metric, though that was following an update.

During the same ride my screen layout also changed, which confused me: setup is done via the app, and can't be done on the device as there's no settings menu. That in itself is a little irritating. For instance, once I'd got the backlight on I discovered it switches off after 10 seconds, and changing it requires you dig out your phone, fiddle about in the app, connect with the device and update it.

So how had my screen layout changed without the app? I eventually realised that pressing the unit's up or down keys (they're on the side) adds or removes fields on the fly. Clearly I'd pressed the Navihood's six buttons a bit too extensively during my 'many hands make light work' phase. Being able to instantly swap from, say, four to five fields seems redundant when you can customise multiple pages anyway... surely there are more useful things those buttons could do mid-ride?

Meanwhile the three buttons on top have multiple roles, sometimes with long presses, and it's not always obvious what you need to do. Usually it's fairly simple in the end, but it can be pretty unintuitive (and frustrating) until then. For instance, having created a route in the app (an impressively easy process) and sent it to the device, you might well scroll through to the navigation pages looking for it. You won't find it.

Instead you have to hold down the button with the three lines/up arrow to find the .gpx files and activate one. You might subsequently think the back/home button on the left would exit the navigation, but it doesn't; you press and hold the three lines again.

Though you make your routes on the app's well-featured maps, and the line snaps neatly to the roads or tracks when you drop markers on the screen, none of that makes it to the Navihood itself. Once riding you see a simple two-line representation of a road against the otherwise blank screen, and the unit beeps to warn of upcoming turns. It gives distance countdowns at the same time, but the numbers are so small I could never read them. Odd, really, as there's plenty of room for usefully-sized ones.

The road on the screen is pretty much limited to the one you're supposed to be on, and surrounding roads or junction are often omitted. That can make telling exactly where you are tricky, especially if you're offroad, as the unit doesn't always know the real shape of the tracks either; the line sometimes just makes an abrupt angle change, which can look like an approaching junction, when in reality you're just going into a long gentle corner and there's no junction to be found. It beeps for corners just the same as for junctions, which doesn't help. It beeps all the time.

If you go wrong all the Navihood can do is point as the crow files towards the road, and unless you're in a field or a car park there's no guarantee you'll physically be able to follow that path. It does at least switch to point to the nearest road rather than stubbornly insisting you return to the original one, and it realises once you're back on course and updates its guidance. That's better than wanting you to go back to where you originally deviated in order to carry on, as some very basic units do.

The Navihood displays what's presumably a warning sign to say you're off-course – a wavy line over a dot – in the top corner, but it's not a symbol I've ever seen. The unit will also display more common symbols there, such as a no entry sign if you're going the wrong way on the right road.

Okay, so this is all pretty critical, but in fairness the navigation is useable, and will probably get you there if you pay atttention – especially on road, where things are more clear cut. It's a lot less impressive for gravel riding, however, as the mapping has a rather patchy knowledge of tracks and fireroads.

Inevitably the Navihood also features all kinds of training-based features that can be combined with speed, cadence, heart rate and power sensors to create very detailed results, but if you're that serious you should really be considering something more highly developed from a more established brand. The Navihood will also talk to your Shimano Di2 drivetrain, but connecting it to the likes of Meilan's own indicator-equipped rear light seems more like its real speed. It's better suited to casual riders than the hardcore.

Value

Given all it offers, the present price of €149.99 isn't bad (around £124.99 at current rate of exchange). But there are some good options elsewhere – even before you take a chance on the waterproofing.

For £129.99 you can get the Magene C606 Smart GPS Bike Computer, for instance, which features a colour touchscreen and will link to Strava and TrainingPeaks.

If you really want to save money the Coospo BC 107 is still just £49.99, two years after we reviewed it at that price, and still very good – it scored an eight.

You do need to spend a fair bit more to get into something like Garmin, though the Edge 130 Plus remains a strong option if you can reach to £169.99 – and because it's a few years old now, it's quite easy to find discounted. At the time of writing, Halfords was selling it for £139.99, for instance.

Our best cycling computers buyer's guide rounds up our favourites from £40 to £650.

Overall

While this offers basic but useable navigation and makes a pretty decent dashboard for all kinds of useful data, having it fog up inside after heavy rain rather overshadowed all that. For fair weather use it's a reasonable option, but as there's plenty of competition – and in the UK, plenty of rain – it's hard to recommend even so.

> Buy now: Meilan Navihood L1 for €149.99 from Amazon 

Verdict

Decent budget unit for data and basic navigation, but ours got damp inside after heavy rain