After a day of using my new Edge, a couple thoughts:
- As expected, the distance/speed measurements are slightly low, because it assumes traveling in a straight line between checkpoints, so you lose a little bit of distance going around corners. Compared with my "normal" computer that uses a wheel sensor, the error is about 1.5%, though I know the wheel sensor is reading slightly high because of tire compression. So it's not too far off.
- The heart rate monitor takes a bit to get itself inline with my heart. The three times I've worn it, it starts out reading really high (235-240 bpm), and then after a little while figures out that it's really supposed to be in the 165 range and stays there for the remainder of the ride. Have to experiment with some different positions and see if I can get it to work better out of the gate.
- Having a pile of concurrent displays is great, and since you get two pages of them, it's even better. Speed, cadence, heart rate, time and distance on the main one, and then a bunch of summaries (avg speed, avg heart rate, etc.) on the second page.
- The provided visualization/export tools are lame (surprise), but MotionBased.com's upload agent uses a fantastic data format. It's XML (surprise again), and it's very well structured. That's going to be the data format that I use for all my stuff, which is kind of ghetto, but until Garmin provides decent native tools, it'll work. I'm on vacation next week, and hopefully I'll be able to get the import mechanism all built out so the data's in the database, and then from there, the sky's the limit.
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