Bike Computers For Sale
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If you didn’t record it, the ride didn’t happen. Such is the beauty of online data-sharing services. But it’s a relatively new phenomenon. Bike computers started becoming a thing in the 1980s. Early companies like Avocet and Cateye demonstrated that having a friction-free pickup on a wheel and an accurate readout on the handlebars was a benefit to bike riding. Polar brought heart rate readings, a new training tool at the time, to the table. Next, data started to get recorded, and metrics were added. Today’s palm-sized bar-mounted machines can have 32GB of memory and a lightning-fast processor to measure and record seemingly countess ride attributes.
Best Bike Computers
The best bike computer is the one that fits your needs. Wireless connectivity is most common, typically with ANT+ and/or Bluetooth signals. So too are computers that can record GPS, speed, heart rate, barometric, and power data every second of every ride. All ride data is then transferred into a file that can be wirelessly uploaded to a computer or the cloud. Many have real-time mapping capabilities and can read a pre-recorded map file for real-time GPS navigation for both road and MTB riding, as well as remain in contact with a smartphone. But such machines can be overkill. Know there are still simple units that give you just speed, distance, and time, all while doing so with long battery life and little to think of.
Garmin Bike Computers
Garmin changed the bike computer game. They figured out how to import GPS data into a time-stamped file and move that file from the handlebar-mounted device into a desktop or laptop computer. Boom. A new way of recording and visualizing rides was born, and a new world of possibilities opened up. Garmin set the standards, even buying the ANT+ wireless signal intellectual property. Their machines are what others are compared to. The Edge series are all bike-mounted. The Forerunner series are wrist-mounted. The Venu series are wrist-mounted machines tilted more for lifestyle than pure fitness. For safety, they’ve integrated their Varia blinky light with on-bike computers.
Wahoo Bike Computers
Wahoo is very much the fun upstart, though they’ve been at it long enough to be a legit player in their own right. They established the protocol of pairing smartphones to bike computers, making it easier and faster to set up the bike-mounted computers and quicker to upload and sync data. Their Elemnt machines are either full-featured or fuller-featured.
Hammerhead Bike Computers
Hammerhead has been ignoring the Garmin vs. Wahoo battle in an effort to re-imagine the bike computer. Their Karoo has an incredible screen for clarity and color, its fast, intuitive, flexible, adaptive, and constantly being improved with firmware updates. It runs on Android software.
Stay tuned to Hammerhead, as they were bought by SRAM in early 2022. This should mean greater availability but also more models, both more basic and more feature-packed than their current model, the Karoo 2.
