Wahoo Elemnt Vs Elemnt Bolt

Doctor, if people are happy
Doctor, if people are happy then fine. However, there was an early clammer to bash the Garmin (had 2 and both work fine) and herald the Wahoo very early in its lifecycle. We now hear its plastic may be dodgy, button build quality is poor and one of its USPs is poor when used in the most common cycling conditions. So maybe not the great piece of kit advertised.

Why take a £50 trade in, they hold their value really well…

alansmurphy wrote:

So the bike computer with a tiny market share continually offered as ‘better’ than the (supposedly crap) market leader acts like a Brexiter (no metric for you) and is falling apart.

 

Sounds awesome! 

Stick with your far superior Garmin then.  Just don’t come to us asking for advice of which rock solid Wahoo to buy when the Garmin crashes mid ride for the hundredth time loosing all your data, then takes 5 minutes to reboot and needs a further factory reset.  Best thing I did with the garmin was to get £50 trade in for it against an elemnt, only reason it didn’t get thrown in a bush is  because I detest littering.  Only thing I don’t like about the elemnt is the spelling of the name.  

PS, nothing supposed about whether my garmin was crap

Huw Watkins wrote:

I have also recently started to notice a very slight rattle from the mount where I think repeated removal  / replacment of the unit has loosened everything up a little.  

Same here, with the Elemnt. It’s only 9 months old, too! Hopefully just the mount wearing down and not the attachment point on the computer!

Identical performance.

Identical performance. Identical software. Elemnt has bigger screen, better battery life, higher resolution (still very low versus a phone though) and two rows of LEDs. I prefer it for those reasons. The audio is much quieter though and that’s both annoying (can’t hear it telling me to turn) but also good (people don’t get annoyed on a group ride). The screen is also a slightly different shade of gray…. That’s about it.

If you hate the design of the Elemnt (it really has a look only its mother could love, although it’s grown on me), have good eyesight and don’t need the extra info on the screen then pick the Bolt. Want all the stuff I said above and can learn to love a chamfered brick, get the Elemnt.

As far as I understand, the

As far as I understand, the two are functionally identical except for the extra LEDs on the Elemnt, in all other respects sharing a firmware base.

I have the Bolt, and find the maps perfectly good for navigating unfamiliar lanes in the rural area I live in, using routes synced from Komoot (you can also sync from Ride With GPS if you prefer). Using monochrome maps to navigate on a small screen without a pre-planned route might be a challenge too far!

You can choose how much data to have on the map screen – I just have one line (two fields, which you can choose depending what’s most important to you), but I think (haven’t checked recently) that you can sacrifice map space and have a second line.

For what it’s worth, the LEDs can be hard to see in bright daylight; I’m not sure I’d want to be reliant on them.