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After over three years, Garmin has updated its flagship GPS navigation computer with a new edition – the Edge 1030. This new large-screen style unit features a longer battery life along with a new external battery pack option. Not only that, it adds in Bluetooth Smart sensor support, FirstBeat Training load metrics, Rider to Rider messaging, and more.
I’ve been riding with the unit for quite a while now and have a pretty good grasp on all these features, so much that it’s definitely in-depth review time. Also, the unit starts shipping today (yes, really). The question is – is the new Edge 1030 worth the price? And more importantly, how well are all these new features implemented? I set out to answer these questions.
As always, once I’m done with this media loaner unit I’ll send it back to the Garmin folks in Olathe, Kansas. After which I’ll head out and get my own unit via normal retail channels. If you found the post useful, feel free to hit up the links at the bottom – I appreciate it.
What’s new:
Let’s dive right into things with what’s new on the Edge 1030. And what you’ll see is that in many cases it’s more of an evolutionary upgrade than it is a revolutionary one. Which isn’t to say that’s bad – in fact, in many ways that’s good, as it minimizes the amount of issues you see at the outset. In any case, in usual DCR style, bulleted list here we come:
– Totally revamped main user dashboard: This is pretty apparent from pretty much any photo you see here. – New FirstBeat Recovery and Training Status metrics: We saw these introduced on FR935/Fenix 5 earlier this year, they mirror the same here. – New External Battery Pack Option: You can now attach a secondary battery pack to the bottom using a locking mechanism. – Longer battery life: Claimed at up to 20 hours internally, and then you can stack on another 24 hours with the battery pack. – Trendline popularity routing: When creating routes, it’ll leverage all the data from Garmin Connect to find the best cycling routes across road, mountain, and gravel categories, meaning that it’s going to leverage where people actually ride. – Support for Bluetooth Smart sensors: Like the Fenix 5 and FR935, you can now pair to Bluetooth Smart heart rate straps, speed, cadence, and power meter sensors. – New Garmin Connect Mobile Course Creator: You’ll see improvements here in conjunction with the new Garmin Connect Mobile (GCM) that allows route creation more easily from the phone. – New Garmin Connect Mobile Workout Creator: As part of the new GCM release, you can now create structured workouts on the phone (finally!). – Rider to Rider Messaging: You can send/receive canned messages to other Edge 1030 users in your friends list. – Real-time Strava Segment listings: The unit will now use your phone to show you actual Strava segments nearby as you ride along (not just pre-loaded ones), along with real-time data on those segments. – New Strava Routes Connect IQ App (pre-loaded): This app allows you to pull your saved Strava Routes directly to your Edge 1030 (this will be released for all Edge Connect IQ compatible units). – TrainingPeaks & Best Bike Split Connect IQ apps pre-loaded: These will automatically be on your unit to begin with. Simple as that. – Updated Workout Functionality: Software now lets you restart a structured workout step, such as if outside and stuck at a red light. – Display handles rain a lot better: The display is far better than before in wet conditions. Check out my video on this below. – New protected microSD card slot: While it comes pre-loaded with maps, you can add more maps on microSD card and this new slot design is much more waterproof/weatherproof – Incident Detection: This was introduced on the Edge 1000 Explore (but not regular Edge 1000, and then the Edge 820 – but it’s here now on the Edge 1030. It’ll notify friends/family when you crash. – New out-front mount: Places unit level with handlebars, instead of above it. – Slightly uglier white external case design: Just my two cents. I like the black look of the Edge 1000. – Landscape mode is gone: It’s dead, Jim. Nobody used it, and it Garmin cut it to focus on other product areas.
Phew!
And the kicker is I’m sure I’m still missing some minor nuance items. Things like when you pick out which data fields to add it’ll show you in tiny text the data fields in the listings you’ve already selected. Or the new controls menu that consolidates mid-ride actions like calibration, live track, and so on. Oh, and for lack of anywhere else to stash it – the price is $599USD.
If you want to see what all this looks like, I’ve put together a simple video that walks through the entire user interface from start to end. It’s just one simple camera angle and me going through the menus – nuttin’ fancy.
So with all that out of the way, let’s dive into the box and more.
Unboxing:
You’re in luck – you get a twofer unboxing in this one! First up is the Edge 1030, and then I’ve got the external battery pack. Note that this is the non-bundle version of the Edge 1030. The bundle version does NOT include the battery pack, but rather the speed/cadence/HR sensors.
Ok, first up the Edge 1030. After cracking open the box seen above, you’ve got the below situation:
And then if you flip that pile over, here’s everything spread out on a table:
Running through each piece individually, first up we’ve got the out-front mount. There’s some notable changes, in that it now puts the Edge 1030 flush with the handlebars. Also, it has a new bottom piece that allows connectivity with the external battery pack.
Here’s the bits that make the mount attach to your handlebars, plus the lanyard.
If you want to use the rubber band mounts instead, there’s a small stash of them and extra bands:
Finally, the Edge itself:
On the bottom, in between the two buttons (which are annoyingly still side-facing), you’ll find the micro-USB charging port. Meanwhile, on the back, you’ll find the charging contacts for the external battery, as well as the microSD card slot:
And finally, for comparison purposes, here’s how it stacks up in size against the Edge 1000:
Now, I’ve got plenty more size and weight comparisons in my video than I show here, which is the total unboxing video including the battery pack. I also got into detail on how the battery pack works as well.
With everything out of the box, let’s talk about the basics.
The Basics:
As part of my general life goal to not reiterate the same basic GPS bike computer things in every review, I’m going to mostly focus on what’s different/unique here Still, I’ll talk a few quick paragraphs on the basics to bring folks up to speed.
First, we’ve got the new dashboard on the Edge 1030. In many ways there’s really only two core sections that are different here (control center and dashboard) in the user interface. Everything else will feel pretty similar. This may remind a lot of folks of the Edge Touring units.
To start an activity you’d tap the button that currently says ‘Road’ on my screen. This is because I’ve got it set up to use an activity profile called ‘Road’. You can create your own activity profiles, which customize things like data pages, how maps work, whether or not Segments show up and many more options. Think of these as your preferences for that ride. You can have numerous profiles.
Once you’ve selected an activity profile, you’ll be ready to ride. It’ll find any paired sensors automatically as well as GPS (if outdoors). These are all visible along the top of the unit in the status line:
If you swipe down you’ll dive into the new controls area, which acts like a quick-access center for various mid-ride things you might want to tweak or do. Previously on the Edge 1000 this was a single page, now you can swipe left/right. Here’s a small gallery of what you can swipe to. They include notifications center, mid-ride control of live tracking, calibration, weather, live Segment explore, general system configuration, and more.
Once riding, you’ll get data as normal – all of which is recorded to a .FIT file. This is the standard that almost all sites use for sport and fitness data. Later on within Garmin Connect, you can also download other file formats like .GPX and .TCX. Further, you can sync to 3rd party apps automatically such as Strava, TrainingPeaks, and more. Here’s an example of a ride recorded with the Garmin Edge 1030:
With those basics out of the way, let’s talk the newer stuff. Specifically starting with the ‘My Stats’ page you’ll have seen back on the main dashboard. This consolidates all of your health/performance related metrics into one place, as well new metrics not seen on the Edge series before.
Up top is the new Training Status including fitness load and stress. This comes from FirstBeat and is the same tech seen on the Fenix 5 and FR935 earlier this year. I talk about it in-depth in this post. Like those devices, you need about a week of training on the unit for these stats to show, and then from there it really takes about four weeks of training for things to really stabilize and be at the peak of their accuracy. Below all that you’ll find your current VO2Max as well as fitness load.
Next, we’ve got current recovery numbers below that, which will decrease over time as you recover. This again comes from FirstBeat and is based on heart rate strap data. And then below that, your FTP. You can either have that automatically determine your FTP, or you can have it manually set.
Now one big bummer here is that while all of this was introduced on the Fenix 5 and FR935, none that data carries over here. I’m a perfect example of why this matters. I generally ride with a separate Edge unit, but I run with a FR935. So all my recovery metrics wouldn’t really be complete on either device (especially the Edge, sans-running data). Ideally, we’d see Garmin carry these metrics across behind the scenes with Garmin Connect, like they do for steps via TrueUp. Hopefully, that happens sooner rather than later.
Next on the new features piece is the rider to rider messaging. This allows you to select canned replies/messages that you can, in turn, send to other Edge 1030 riders on your friends list. This functionality leverages that of Live Tracking, which has been around for many years. Now though you’ve got a dedicated control panel for it that you can initiate messages directly from. You’ll see below one of my contacts that’s riding at that time. I’ve configured this page not to show up if nobody else on my list is riding:
Next, I can see his location on the map, in comparison to my location:
And at the bottom, I can go ahead and select to message him. There’s about 20 or so canned messages I can send to him.
And then he can reply accordingly:
I demonstrate how this all works in this short 5-minute video. Super easy to do.
Note that at this point you can’t customize any of these messages, nor can you simply type out a response. These are what you get. I’d love to be able to customize some of these in the app and then have them available to use. For example, to have canned messages to taunt friends that are slackin’, or messages to say meet at specific/favorite cafes.
One more area I want to very briefly note is the new ability to create workouts on Garmin Connect Mobile. This used to require Garmin Connect desktop, or a 3rd party service. Now you can do it from your mobile app:
Last but not least, before we dive into navigation and other areas, let’s talk about the display. It’s definitely different/improved upon the Edge 820. Certainly there were lots of comments on the Edge 820 touch screen display. For some it worked great. For others it sucked. For yet more people (most), it may have sucked for about half the year, and then got better with various firmware updates. I suspect most of those that still reside in the ‘suck’ camp probably actually have hardware issues more so than anything else. And I suspect it’s mostly a display manufacturing issue, hence the variability people see.
In any event, at this point, I’ve only got a sample size of one (me). But I can say that even side by side the Edge 1030 display is incredibly good in rain. During a recent random-ass thunderstorm I went outside and filmed this simple segment to show how well it works. This was a one-take wonder. No other takes, just this one shot:
That behavior seems to mirror what I’ve seen during other rainy rides as well. Again though, I’m interested in seeing how things work longer term with other people’s units now that this is on the market.
Mapping & Navigation:
Of course, the main reason you’d buy the Edge 1030 over other units is really the navigation components. It differs from most mid-range units that may have maps in that the Edge 1030 can act as a standalone unit when it comes to routing to points of interest locales, addresses, and really anywhere you want to go. Whereas units like the Edge 520, Wahoo ELEMNT/BOLT, and more all require some sort of computer or phone to do any routing. I talk a lot about the nuances here when it comes to routing in my recent ‘Best Bike Computer’ post.
With that, if we tap on Navigation on the pretty home screen we’ll get to a less exciting navigation menu. It’s here we can do normal stuff like browse the map and search for places to route to.
It’s this search piece that sets the Edge 820/1000/1030 in a different category than other units, as you can do this all on the unit itself without cellular connectivity. So I can search for restaurants, hotels, etc… In other words – it’s what you expect from a touring computer where you may be somewhere without data service.
All that works fine and dandy, and I actually just used it on Saturday to route to a random hotel near the top of a mountain while biking. Super quick and easy.
However, what I want to focus on is the new course creation bit. Garmin has always had the ability to do course creation from the unit itself, often under the ‘Round Trip Routing’ piece, but equally true of just routing somewhere one way (or a selection of waypoints). But now with the Edge 1030, you’ve got what’s called ‘Trendline Popularity Routing’, which means that it leverages Garmin Connect data to determine these routes. As you might image, there are millions upon millions of activities uploaded to Garmin Connect (my guess is probably upwards of a million per day). And most times people ride in places that have the best and most efficient routes. So by applying a heatmap-like concept to that, you get better Edge routes.
Now you won’t really see much different on the Edge 1030 itself. It’s just that the underlying data is better. And in my testing in doing a couple of random-ass routes from Paris (where it normally sucks on round trip routing), I got some really solid ones. For example, this ride I did a few weekends ago was driven by the Edge 1030.
Interestingly, on the Garmin Connect Mobile app you can also create routes as well now. These options are purely focused on round-trip routes, so you can’t just quickly tap out a new route with waypoints yet. But still, it’s cool to create routes there and be off and cookin’:
Once out riding, navigation works pretty much as you’d expect. It’ll overlay the route you’re on, as well as notify you as you approach turns:
I had no issues with any routing, and almost all of my rides actually had routes on them – even if just silly routes. The only time I didn’t get notified of a turn was when the auto-generated popularity route had me on a bike path that paralleled the road. I ignored this and stayed on the road, so when we got to a traffic circle and the bike path didn’t have said circle, I didn’t get a turn notification. But that’s my bad.
More importantly – I didn’t have any issues with re-routing. This is an area that some folks have seen trouble with in the past, such as when they go off-course. My suspicion is that this was typically related to routes created by 3rd party apps (.TCX/.GPX) that were more challenging on re-routing. Garmin said they’ve worked on this a bit in not only the Edge 1030, but also a recent update sent out for the Edge 820 that focuses on re-routing scenarios for courses.
In my case, I often used the Strava Routes functionality, which in effect does exactly the same thing as you’d do manually – exporting a route from Strava and plopping it on the Edge 1030. No issues with re-routing there either.
Also – and perhaps most notable is that it doesn’t take forever to calculate a route like the Edge 820 does. This was one of my chief complaints with the Edge 820 in that it was roughly 1 minute per 20 miles of course. So you’re talking a number of minutes just standing there waiting.
Sensors & Battery Pack:
When it comes to sensors, the Edge 1030 carries through all of the existing sensor compatibility we’ve seen in the past from an ANT+ perspective, but it also adds in new sensors as well from the Bluetooth Smart side. This is the first Edge unit to support Bluetooth Smart sensors, following Garmin adding that functionality into the Fenix 5 and FR935 earlier this year.
In total, here’s all the the sensor types the Edge 1030 supports:
ANT+ Cadence only sensors
ANT+ Edge Remote
ANT+ eBike
ANT+ Heart Rate
ANT+ Bike Lighting Control
ANT+ Power Meters
ANT+ Radar
ANT+ Gear Shifting (SRAM RED eTAP, Campagnolo EPS)
ANT Shimano DI2
ANT+ Speed/Cadence combo sensors
ANT+ Speed only sensors
ANT+ Varia Vision (aka remote displays)
ANT VIRB Action Cam
Bluetooth Smart Cadence only sensors
Bluetooth Smart Heart Rate
Bluetooth Smart Power Meters
Bluetooth Smart Speed/Cadence Combo
Bluetooth Smart Speed-only sensors
Phew, got all that? Good.
Oh, and then you’ve got 3rd party pieces like Muscle Oxygen sensor support via Connect IQ apps as well (for Moxy, and now discontinued BSX devices). Plus other 3rd parties have done other private-ANT implementations via Connect IQ too.
I’ve tested a bunch of sensors with the Edge 1030 and haven’t noticed any issues. I’ve largely done ANT+, but I have done some Bluetooth Smart rides on specific sensors as well. As an aside, you can see here how a BLE sensor shows up within the Edge 1030:
Ok, but what you were all waiting for was the battery pack piece. I may do a separate post on this, but for now we’ll keep it here (since it’s only compatible with the Edge 1030 at this point). The Edge 1030 has connectors on the bottom for the new external battery pack. These connectors allow you to mount the external battery pack via the included out-front mount and then power your Edge 1030 further. In total the battery pack is said to give an additional 24 hours of battery life (which puts you in the 44 hour range in total):
The battery pack itself charges via micro-USB, like most battery packs out there today. It has a 3,300mAh capacity, so it’s on the lower end of USB battery packs its size. Though, it’s also designed to be waterproof (IPX7 so up to 1m for up to 30 mins) and snap onto the front of a bike computer at speed. Obviously, there are tradeoffs here compared to a simple USB lipstick charger.
The unit has battery status indicators on the edge of it, allowing you to see current battery status. Unfortunately there isn’t anything clever like Apple’s own iPhone case where it shows battery status of the battery within the Edge unit, though that’d be cool.
On the bottom of the unit near the micro-USB charging port you’ll also find a regular USB charging port so you can charge your phone or other device.
As a pro tip, I take along this simple and cheap charging cable with me if I’m headed out for a long ride. It allows me to charge my phone via it (has Micro-USB, USB-C, Apple Lightning, mini-USB connectors), and I can even plug the battery pack into a USB port at a café or such. It’s like my most favorite $8 cable ever.
Finally, this whole thing locks in place using a locking system on the out-front mount that you swap out. I show how this works in the unboxing video up above – so take a look at that for more details on it all (sometimes it’s easier to explain in a video).
The thing is pretty stable though, so I don’t expect any issues. Nor have I had any issues in terms of cobbles or the like. It’s a rock solid locking system, very similar to that of the Garmin UT-800 lights.
Of course – some of you might say that for the price ($130USD) you could buy a boatload of USB battery packs. And that’s absolutely true, you can. But you can’t buy ones that are waterproof and sit seamlessly below the Edge unit on the same mount. If you’re ‘just’ doing day touring, then honestly I’d just get a cheap USB battery pack too. Whereas if you’re doing 24-hour style rides, then I’d probably go with something like this.
Lastly, I regret to inform you have I haven’t gone out for a 40-44 hour non-stop ride, so I can’t vouch for whether or not it holds up to that much pounding. But if any DCR readers do so down the road with it – I’d love to hear about it!
Strava & 3rd Party Apps:
The Edge 1030 carries through support for Garmin Connect IQ apps, like the Edge 1000 had (as does the Edge 520 and 820). This means that 3rd party apps can be developed for the Edge series like before. I talk extensively about this in all these posts.
What’s notable here though is that with the Edge 1030 they’re pre-loading apps from Strava, TrainingPeaks and Best Bike Split. I’ve talked about the TrainingPeaks one previously. It’s this new Strava app though that’s most interesting to me, and is something I’ve actually been testing most of the summer. This new app allows you to pull Strava Routes from your Strava account, straight to your Edge for navigation. You’ll do a quick one-time activation via Garmin Connect Mobile, and then from there the Edge 1030 will pull your Strava routes from your account:
You can tap on any given route to see high-level stats about it (no map on this page yet):
And then you can hit ‘Navigate route’, which will download the route to your Edge 1030. At which point it’ll ask which activity profile to use.
It’s at this juncture that the Strava route hands off the course package to the native Edge 1030 routing engine and it does its job as normal. Still, you can see the ride route and so on from this page:
All of this works really well, as I discussed in the navigation section.
But here’s the best thing: it’s coming to the other Edge units via Connect IQ app. You should be able to download this app for the Edge 520, 820, and 1000 as of now (these are the only Connect IQ capable Edge units). In fact, I’ve been using it on the Edge 820 for much of the summer and it works great.
Finally, on the Strava front, you’ve got some new functionality that’s not quite as obvious. First is that while you’re out riding you’ve got a new Strava controls page that shows you nearby Strava Segments. This control panel is actually pulling live segments via your phone for the roads around you:
So you can tap on any of these and then go off and compete on that Segment. As part of that, they’re now calculating leaders and related data live, in real-time, using the phone connection. Previously this was cached from whenever it was the last time you synced. This also goes for people who are closest to you (friends) on the leaderboards. Pretty neat.
While these two items may sound minor, they’re part of the larger play from Strava to get you to sign up for their Premium membership, as all of these Strava related features do require a Premium membership.
GPS & Elevation Accuracy:
When it comes to GPS accuracy, in general you see bike computers do pretty well on road conditions. This is because in most cases you’re travelling pretty quick and there’s not a lot of random movement like you would be when running. Still, we’ll take a look at things as well as at barometric altimeter accuracy, which is an area that sometime varies on units.
I’m going to dive straight into analyzing the first set, which is a mountain ride. This ride was this past weekend in the Swiss Alps with the 1030, two other Edge 520’s, and a Fitbit Ionic. All have barometric altimeters. Here’s the link to the DCR Analyzer set if you want to poke around yourself. Here’s the altimeter track on that ride:
These are displayed in meters. Note that on the right side that’s the point in time the little dots are at. So you’ll see, as is typical, that there’s a pretty even offset between the units. Picking this point you see that the elevation is reported as:
In all these cases I simply let GPS acquire it automatically. I wasn’t interested in setting a specific GPS elevation point, since quite frankly I didn’t know what that point was at my starting location. I don’t generally care whether or not there are a dozen meters of offset between the actual and reported location. What I care about instead is the ups and downs – the ascent and descent. Check out this small climb in the middle of the descent:
This only lasted about 30 seconds, but you can see that all Edge units tracked nicely. Whereas the Fitbit was a bit wobbly through here (it’s still beta though). Also of note is that you’ll see the same ordering exists from start to finish on the altimeter readings – meaning that they’re staying consistent.
Looking at the GPS track, things look very good throughout this ride, but especially at the start where I’m in a partial tunnel (a snow shed, where one side is open, but otherwise under a cliff), against a mountain. One of the Edge 520 units struggled a bit here, but everyone else was happy:
For this, it’s easier for you to zoom around the set yourself, which you can do here. Note on the distances, these were pretty close by the end of it:
There’s a spread of less than 100 meters between the three Edge units after 40,000 meters. And the Fitbit was only another 200 meters out from there. Note that since the PowerTap hub has a speed sensor in it, that distance would be considered the ‘true’ distance.
Next, we’ve got a more city-focused set, where I start inside of Paris and then head outside. On this ride, I had a crapton of devices (2xEdge 520, Edge 820, FR935, Suunto Spartan Trainer, FR935, Lezyne Mini GPS). Most of these have barometric altimeters.
So there’s a lot going on here, but of note is that while there is again a slight offset spread between the units of about +/-10 meters, that offset stays the same the entire time, even through the rollers and such (some other units do have variations though). Again, it’s probably easier for you to zoom in on the different tracks in the Analyzer file here.
What about distance? Well again – very close between them. Almost all of them are within about 100m, on over 60,000 meters of riding. And in fact, most are within a small 35-50 meter spread. Note that aside from the PowerTap G3 unit, none of the others had a speed sensor attached.
Now, what if I recorded the same power meter on three units? Would that look the same? Let’s look:
You can see the three units recorded the same Assioma power meter data almost identically. You’ll see very slight differences in average power, mostly due to how transmission and recording works at the sub-1 second layer. But otherwise, things are very solid here.
Now I’ll be uploading the rest of my sets later today into a table to check out, though at the moment a bit slammed with slow WiFi at Eurobike. Still, I can say that the rest of the sets are pretty boring, in that they all show the same thing over and over again: Good GPS accuracy, and consistent barometric altimeter accuracy.
Note that in most of my Paris rides I also had tunnels I’d go through – and there were no issues of weird entry/exit issues on the tunnels.
(Note: All of the charts in these accuracy sections were created using the DCR Analyzer tool. It allows you to compare power meters/trainers, heart rate, cadence, speed/pace, GPS tracks and plenty more. You can use it as well, more details here.)
Summary:
Overall the new Edge 1030 is fairly impressive. It fills in many of the minor gaps that people looking at this type of unit have complained about. Be it longer battery life or battery extender options, or better Strava Routing integration. Not to mention the touch screen definitely improves upon the Edge 820 (though, I don’t see much difference compared to the Edge 1000). Next, the new training load pieces are a nice addition, and on other Garmin devices they’ve been introduced to – they’re generally well received.
Of course, there are still some minor quirks I wish were different. The first being those very same training load/recovery pieces, those should really be integrated across the Garmin platform seamlessly. After all – it’s in Garmin’s interest financially to drive you to buy other devices. Then there’s the buttons on the front instead of the top, which can be tricky in some out-front mounts, especially with gloves. And finally, a personal annoyance is the white bezel. I know, it’s nit-picking, but seriously, it just looks ugly and reminds me of the Touring units. But the core of the unit works well – especially in navigation.
Still, ignoring those nitpick items – it’s a really solid unit for those that need the extra battery life, or want the larger display. The display quality is brilliant – both in bright daylight as well as dusk and night – and the new dashboard startup screen is a much cleaner way to start each workout from.
With that – thanks for reading, and feel free to drop any questions down below.
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Hopefully you found this review/post useful. At the end of the day, I’m an athlete just like you looking for the most detail possible on a new purchase – so my review is written from the standpoint of how I used the device. The reviews generally take a lot of hours to put together, so it’s a fair bit of work (and labor of love). As you probably noticed by looking below, I also take time to answer all the questions posted in the comments – and there’s quite a bit of detail in there as well.
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Thanks for reading! And as always, feel free to post comments or questions in the comments section below, I’ll be happy to try and answer them as quickly as possible. And lastly, if you felt this review was useful – I always appreciate feedback in the comments below. Thanks!
Temperature has started dipping into the 40s here in Northern NJ and I wore gloves for the 1st time with the 1030 in my last ride. They are Castelli Gaga midweight gloves with wind stopper tech and could not use the 1030 at all. The screen wouldn’t register my fingerprint at all to swipe or tap.
I don’t recall if the gloves worked w/ my 810 but I want to say that they did. That would be absurd though so maybe I’m wrong.
Same over here with Castelli and GribGrab gloves, both equiped with “touch-screen-fingerprints”. Doesn’t work at all. Happy with my Garmin remote……. however, use with gloves should be no problem in my opinion……..
Hi, picked up my 1030 today, upgraded from 810. I am trying to figure out how to load my different bikes (3) onto the profile for selection at start of ride as with the 810.
Are you able to give me some pointers?
Paul (South Africa)
Garmin has done away with bike profiles (as of a number of years ago). Instead, you’ve got activity profiles, and sensor pools. So basically, you’ll add in all the sensors from all your bikes. You can specify odometers there as well, and tweak as need be.
Activity profiles are aligned to things like road riding, racing, training, trainer, etc… Whatever you want them to be. You can customize those, and then you choose that based on the activity type. It’ll automatically find your bike based on the sensors on that bike as soon as you activate those sensors.
It’s a little quirky at first – but once you get the hang of it it’s much more flexible.
Is there any data to provide insight to AXS Red and Garmin 1030 capabilities? I’m trying to display my gears on my Garmin 1030 and have been struggling to make it work. Is this not possible for SRAM AXS Red and Garmin 1030?
Any updates regarding Garmin integrating its advanced training metrics across its platform? It seems to me that this is a no-brainer as isolated metrics may present a misleading picture of fitness, recovery, etc. and thus are potentially harmful. Will Garmin ever integrate the advanced metrics into its older devices (for example, the Edge 820) or will they be limited to the 1030 and future models?
Obrigado pela excelente analise ao produto, antes de comprar li atentamente e deu muito jeito.
Quando recebo uma chama telefonica e vejo quem me liga, ou recebo sms, não consigo responder.
Será que esta funcionalidade só dá para quem também tem um Edge 1030?
Agradeço comentários da vossa experiência.
Obrigado,
Luís
i’ve just bought 1030 mostly for touring. Following your instructions for downloading open street maps to 1000, I think I’ve managed to put some maps of Chile & Argentina onto an SD card, via my Mac. But I can’t see anything on the 1030 or tell whether the maps are readable on the Garmin – how do I find the map ( once I’ve put SD card in the 1030) on to the garmin? Do I need to be in the location ( I’m in the UK)?
Also the map does not appear to be readable on my Mac, once I’ve downloaded via the email link from open street. I get message “gmapsupp.im g……no mountable file systems”
It is really a pity to see how Garmin products just suck from the software question. My point is… when the software is so buggy, then can the metrics about recovery time, ftp, etc. be considered as reliable?
8n the video below, I have noticed how the Bluetooth connection issue depends on the status of the Garmin Connect application on the phone: when it is open, then 1030 is connected, when it is closed, n9 way. However, you cannot keep the application open dur8ng a ride, as there must be some infinite loop in the code that makes the battery drain fast (and transforms the phone in a portable heater).
However, it is reall6 8nterest8ng to see that the connection issue is a bug solely related to the connection protocol of 1030, in fact if I switch on my 820 – and it will connect even witHout the application being open -, then even the 1030 connects!!!
Minor FYI, since it looks like you’re on iOS11…it’s crapped the bed across BT devices and connectivity across the board – not just limited to Garmin. The very latest version (11.2 on public beta) is much better, but I still get random drop-outs across any number of different vendors. May worth trying the beta to see if that solves your issue.
As for why the Edge 820 might stay connected but the Edge 1030 not? Again, the oddity with the iOS11 BT issues is that it’ll drop some connections but not others. I suspect there’s some very subtle things behind the scenes on how connections are coded that dictate that – but that’s beyond me. I can two watches and one drops connect and one doesn’t, and then later in the day they invert. :-/
I think it is all explained here: link to developer.apple.com
Most probably, the background handler which is awakened by the phone on the BLE connection supports the 820 but not the 1030 (yet). I believe this is an issue of Garmin Connect app, and not the 1030 itself…
As a developer – however – i’m Really shocked b6 the immaturity of the Garmin ecosystem. Also the IQ App Store reminds me the Symbian times.
The only trick is that for everyone else, the Edge 1030 connectivity does seem to work for tracking and such. For example, in the video demo you see up there about the friend tracking feature, I did that ride for over 2 hours with it tracking in my back pocket and not opened up. :/
After Apple’s newest iOS update last week, 11.1.1, I don’t have an issue keeping connection any longer. Well, at least not on the 2 rides I’ve done since. 11.1.2 is out now also.
The Edge 1030 would accept the Apple Watch, but alas, the Apple Watch doesn’t actually re-broadcast HR over Bluetooth Smart unfortunately as a standard BLE HR device.
I’d love to upgrade from my ancient Edge 800 to a 1030, but am wondering if the 1030 eliminates these 2 horrible design flaws that existed in the 800: (1) needing to set Turn Guidance ON for EVERY course downloaded into the unit, rather than having Turn Guidance as a settable global default, and (2) allowing changing the color of the course line that’s displayed during navigation, which is the awful magenta that is close to the color of many of the roads in the maps, thus creating much confusion.
I think if you’re happy with the Edge 1000 – then you probably don’t need to upgrade unless there’s specific features on the Edge 1030 that are of significant value to you.
You have the best connections to Garmin and Strava…
Any indication that Strava /Garmin will lift their maximum amount of Strava Live Segments you’re able to copy on an Edge device?
A maximum of 100 Live Segments – sorry my language – sucks ‘solid spheres’!!
Thanks for the review. My question is around the integration of PowerTap P1 and the Edge 1030. Is it possible to get the detailed pedal metrics for the P1 Pedals as you can now connect them via BLE? or will it still be standard power metrics
Nah, it’s the same on either (no fancy metrics). PowerTap doesn’t transmit those in any standard format yet. See this for more though: link to dcrainmaker.com
Does anyone actually have a Garmin Charge Power Pack? (I asked on the forum a couple of days ago, and there have been no responses.)
I ordered the Edge 1030 & Power Pack at the same time, around announcement day. The Edge arrived on September 30, and has been in almost daily service since. The shop originally said the Power Pack was expected in a couple of weeks. After that couple of weeks, they said “in November”. Now November is 3/4 over, and there is no news on the Power Pack. Garmin’s Web site says it has a 5 – 8 week availablility. An email to Garmin Support a couple of weeks ago got the reply, “We know of no production problems; if you ordered today, it should arrive by January 18.”
I’m wondering if DCRainmaker’s unit is the only one Garmin ever produced, and whether this is a real product.
As always thanks for the great review which encouraged me to get the 1030 and I’m enjoying the new features. Hoping you or someone may be able to help me with the following. I don’t always want to show the lap screen and with the Edge 1000 you could enable or disable a specific data screen. With the 1030, I only see “remove” which means that you have to recreate it each time. Am I missing a step? Or do I have to now create a new profile for these instances?
The Garmin Edge 1000 is a dog. The older Garmin 500 series were pretty solid but Garmin have gone downhill WRT quality big time. I went through a couple of 800s and then switched to a 1000. The features and functionality are amazing that all comes to nought because it’s a shockingly bad device. The touch screen either does not operate or, m ore likely, becomes so sensitive that drops of sweat or rain select things on the screen or cause it to detect to many touches so the screen locks. The two buttons at the bottom of the devices are ill-fitting and so rattle around even on the smoothest road (the only damn thing that rattles on my bike and I can’t do anything about it!). It’s also prone to software glitches where it will not start up or freezes on a certain screen. No amount of resetting will work, the only fix is to leave it and let the battery run dead.
I have had it “fixed” previously but the old issues eventually return. I was a massive Garmin fan and always thought that the premium price was worth it but no more. A cheap device will provide the functionality that you need at a fraction of the cost and with the reliability. For a little more money there are a stack of other devices that have almost all the functionality but are a stack more reliable.
I’d love to go out and confidently purchase the 1030 for myself for Christmas but these quality issues are making me think more than twice. After being a Garmin fan-boy for a long time, I think my next device (I am battling to reset my frozen Garmin again at the moment) may have to be a Wahoo or a Bryton.
Dave, It’s hard to imagine a more different evaluation of the Edge 1000 than yours and mine. I used the Edge 1000 for over 1400 activities, with very few problems. The cover over the On/Off button cracked, exposing the innards of the unit to dust or moisture, and I let that be my excuse to buy an Edge 1030 (heck, I would have bought it anyway). I let the hard drive fill up with rides, and started getting “corrupt” .FIT files, where dates and times were invalid – two or three years in the future. Removing my history regularly seems to have solved that glitch. I don’t have any issues with the Lap and Start buttons – no loose, not rattling, etc.
The Edge 1030 has over 50 activities on it already, and it has worked very well for me. I ran the battery for 20 hours and a few seconds, using Battery Save Mode, and had 17% battery life left. I’ve used Nav – no problems. I have Garmin Vector 2 pedals and Varia lights – both work fine. I did have to connect the power pedals a time or two – now, I turn the cranks three times as I turn the Edge on, and all is well.
I read on the forum that updating the software could cause settings to get lost, so I updated the software before doing anything else when I first got my Edge. I skipped from version 3.20 to 3.50, because I read that some issues weren’t fixed in 3.40.
I still can’t get my Edge 1000 and Edge 1030 to share files – I tried to copy a course over to the 1030, and I tried going the other direction, too. I never could get my Edge 1000 to share with a friend’s 1000 either, so I suspect my Edge 1000 of being the problem.
So, premium price aside, I think you could get an Edge 1030 and be happy with it. Either way, Merry Christmas!
Very much so. The last stable software I had was Edge 810 version 3.6, so 3 years ago??? 1030 issues are creeping up, and since they have yet to resolve prev model issues, and it is the same team, the best word that could describe their R&D is amateurism. My assessment is that they will never fix the issues because they lack the skillset to do so. Having users redo folders after loosing an nth ride data is silly.
In your opinion is the 1030 worth the extra over the 820?
Is the touchscreen on the 820 as bad as some people say it is, or does it seem to vary from unit to unit?
I would be using it mainly for tracking but also navigation leading club rides and for sportives.
First, the Edge 820 touch screen. Commentary on it roughly falls into three camps:
A) Comments pre-Jan 2017: Discard these comments on issues seen, too much has changed since then in firmware updates.
B) Comments post-Jan 2017: Most peoples issues were fixed around then by software updates, with the exception of people that just had poor manuf displays, in which case they’re still finicky. Beyond that, I think some issues are legit, and some are more perception. People keep comparing it to a phone. But this isn’t a phone, the battery life is dramatically different and the conditions for usability are dramatically different. Sure, we’d love iPhone X touchability, but that’s not realistic for a handlebar device at this point.
C) Overall: I think the screen touchability is functional. Not fantastic, but pretty solid for a device that size. Still, over time I realize I do just prefer buttons on the Edge 520 – but that’s not really the same type of device.
RE: Edge 1030 vs 820
Totally depends on what you want the features for. For navigation and stuff there isn’t massive differences if you do planning prior to departing. If you do tracking of others mid-ride, then there’s more differences. Personally, I don’t much care on a day to day basis which device is on my handlebars, they both do the trick.
My Edge 1030 works just fine with gloves on. It’s important to set the touch sensitivity to high. Before I did that, it was “touch and go”, or “touchy” – well anyway, it only worked about half the time.
I posted this in the Garmin forums too, but wanted to post here, since I was one of the early complainers.
Things seem to have been updated and at least for me, are working well so far.
I got out for some 4 hour rides over the weekend with my 1030 on Firmware 3.6 and the early issues I encountered in October seem to be fixed.
I upgraded to fw 3.6 and then did a system reset (just because).
1. Phone connection – hasn’t disconnected from my Google Pixel Android phone once yet.
2. Grade ( incline / decline ) – seems to be working fine now. Matched the readings on my 1000. (I read from -3 to 10%)
3. Using a speed sensor, the distance matched exactly with my 1000, no dropouts.
4. Remote stayed connected the entire 4 hours.
-Note: When I FIRST connected it (to both the 1000 and 1030) the 1030 gave it a different deviceID and disconnected once. I removed it from the list and re-added it and the deviceID matched and stayed connected). I think this might depend on which two buttons you hold on the remote to sync it? I used the two non-blue buttons last time.
5. Battery life – with ant+ sensors and phone connected, and backlight set to 15 second timeout (would view it now and then) – I got almost 5% per hour, compared to 10% with the Edge 1000.
6. Touch screen with gloves. I wore some light winter gloves (not touch compatible) – they worked fine on the 1000 and sometimes took a few swipes on the 1030. If I pressed a little harder it was fine. However the 1030 has a ‘sensitivity’ setting that I didn’t see until afterward. I set it to high, and didn’t notice much difference between the 1000 and 1030.
7. Screen – I head initially complained big time about this. However, I was running completely custom maps and the shaded background I’d used did not work well in the woods. This was partially my own fault. This time I used the built in OSM, then used free topo maps from gpsfiledepot, both looked fine in the woods, even with shaded relief turned on. I then overlaid a custom transparent map of my trails, and ran both the Edge 1000 and 1030 through a day / night ride in the woods. They both looked nearly the same and both read fine. I had an easier time reading the 1030 this time around. The little bit of extra size actually makes the trails easier to distinguish.
The only difference from my Edge 1000 and Vivoactive is, where they estimated 1950 calories burned, the 1030 showed 1500. I don’t pay a lot of attention to that. Maybe there’s a setting somewhere (I thought I’d synced them) – or a difference in the logic used.
In all, everything seemed to work great.
I have mainly one question, is it worth upgrading from 1000? – just recently upgraded my 910XT to 935 and like the new metrics with recovery, race paces and VO2 max values. However, I like a bigger screen for cycling. Do talk “communicate” through Garmin Connect so that my cycling vo2 max is updated on my 935 when using the 1030 for cycling?
I have a question regarding the navigation and, as a Garmin 810 user with Garmin’s maps, I’ve been ‘ticked off’ with Garmin’s inability to navigate a route that has a loop in it, say like a figure 8. I even entered these routes into the 810 via Garmin Connect on the PC and uploaded to the unit. The issue was that it wouldn’t correctly navigate the route until you’d passed the final part of the route that had the loop in it.
Do you know if Garmin changed how they handle routing in situations like this?
New 1030 user coming from a 820. The difference in screen quality is huge. Much brighter and of course easier to see thanks to its size. For the moment only a couple of rides but more than happy with the change.
Thanks for the great review. As always, the deepest one available covering all aspects.
Unfortunately a comparison table to edge 1000, 820 is missing, which would be useful for me.
Plus:
How does the battery life behaves in cold weather (0 to 15 degrees celsius ) or when routing is on? Is it possible to charge the battery while the device is running via a standard usb powerbank?
I rather want to use a solid versatile applicable usb-powerbank, than a specific and expensive Garmin battery.
Ray, one small correction to your table: 1000 has crash detection (Cycling section says it doesn’t).
Also, two questions:
Question 1: In the Connectivity section of your table, what do you mean by “Emergency/SOS Message Notification (From Watch To Contacts)” ?
Question 2: In the 1030, did Garmin fix the font size problem they introduced sometime after the 810? (Not complaining about data labels, but the data that is generated / displayed under the label, in the data field.) With my old 810, they used decently large fonts in data fields, though they truncated the data if it exceeded the available space. After that (or at least, with the 1000), they started using much smaller fonts in data fields.
For me, this problem is particularly bothersome when one chooses to display “Navigation / Location at Next” — on the 1000, even if the Location (course point) name is short, the data font is TINY, regardless of how short or long the Location name is. The text is too small for my post-40 eyes.
Karl is correct, the Edge 1000 lacks the hardware in it. The other variants do, as they came out a year later.
The Emergency/SOS feature was related to some units that are no longer available (Bia primarily) that had cellular connectivity in it. Actually, Apple Watch has that now too.
I’m not sure I entirely understand the issue, but I haven’t seen anything truncated on the 1030.
My error re crash detection: I was thinking of the 1000 Explore, which is what I bought when my 810 died.
Re truncating: let me re-phrase: The issue is that when one customizes a Data Screen to include a parameter that is text, the 1000 Explore displays that text in a VERY small font — hard to read for post-40 eyes. I’m guessing Garmin chose a small font in order to fit a long text string into the space provided.
They had a better solution on my prior Garmin (810): the text was much larger than on the 1000 Explore, and if the text string was too long, the 810 truncated it to fit in the space. Even if you didn’t see the whole string, old guys like me could at least read the text — vs. not being able to read a long (or short) text string on the 1000 Explore.
So my question is: how does the 1030 display text data? (The data field I’m most interested in is “Navigation / Location at Next” — which is labeled “Next Point” when it is included on a Data Screen. It shows the name of the course point that is coming up next on a course you have downloaded to the device.)
I am still having trouble with my 1030 and BT_Edge 1030. iPhone X. Latest iOS and Edge software. No problem pairing but have to manually force the connection. Doesn’t want to stay connected and won’t sync with Garmin Connect via the iPhone at the end of a ride unless I manually force the connection again. Whether Garmin Connect is open or not doesn’t seem to make any difference. Are others still having this problem?
Fwiw, I use it with an iPhone X, and though I haven’t done any live tracking lately with it, I haven’t seen any post-ride upload issues either.
Have you tried totally resetting everything Bluetooth-wise? There’s a little paragraph I wrote somewhere up early (like, early September) in the comments section on how to do it. There’s a bit more nuance than it might seem, so doing all the steps usually seems to help.
I remember the little paragraph, but have been trying to avoid going that route for several reasons. First I thought it related more to getting the iPhone and the 1030 paired, which hasn’t been a problem; second, I thought with all of us Garmin beta testers out there ? that Garmin might finally come up with a solution to the problem so that my 1030 would upload, etc. just like my 810; and third, I wasn’t sure what other things I would have to reset if I went that route. Not too worried about this last now, but just got a new version of the 1030 system software, which seems to hold the BT_Edge connection better, but still no automatic connect. I’m going to try it out a bit longer and see what happens. If uploading remains a problem, I’ll try the instructions in the little paragraph. Many thanks for the quick response.
i have the Edge 1000 now and will soon get the 1030 so the review was very helpful. I also have the Garmin Radar unit which works fine except the beep on the 1000 when traffic is approaching is barely audible and is even less audible in windy conditions. I have tried a different mount (the old one that does not extend or anything) which helps a bit but not much. Any suggestions that you have other than Garmin increasing the volume on the Edge–they say the speaker is directly above the mount which reduces the volume
I also just got the Varia taillight unit and it works fine with the 1030, but haven’t really paid attention to the beep, preferring to watch the display instead. In that regard, the out front mount is a huge improvement over the old one for me from a visibility standpoint. So no suggestions on how to improve the beep. I did notice that it sometimes loses track of vehicles that are up really close so it’s not a substitute for looking over your shoulder. It also had a nervous breakdown when I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on the sidewalk–too many cars passing too quickly. Froze but was able to fix by just stopping the ride on the other side of bridge and starting it again.
I am also now running the latest software version (3.70.0.0), and it seems it may have addressed my BT_Edge 1030 connection issues. But not sure yet. Need some more “beta” testing.
Follow up to last post. It appears that the latest update to the 1030 software has corrected the bluetooth connection/upload issues. Last two rides connection worked fine. Keeping my fingers crossed.
I ski in winter and bike/climb in summer. Do you think I could use 1030 for my ski touring and mountaineering trips? I mean, I know it is expensive but I hope I could have one unit for my whole year activities.
You can certainly use it, but it’s not designed for that, so it won’t be ideal. I used an Edge 705 for a while when cross country skiing. The biggest problem was where to keep it. I think there are Garmin quarter turn wrist mounts that can be used with a 1030, but it’s really to big and clunky to mount on your wrist. (I’d be afraid of catching it on something.) I kept my 705 in a pocket in my anorak or in my Camelbak, and if I wanted to see it, I’d have to stop go through the trouble of taking it out. It certainly recorded the data and the track without any problem, it was just not an ideal form factor for the purpose. Nowadays I use an Epix for skiing. It’s mounted on my wrist outside my clothing and immediately visible without stopping, and I have an Edge 1000 for cycling.
Before you decide on that, you should take a look at the Fenix 5X, its successor. The Epix wasn’t supported well by Garmin and was effectively abandoned 6 months after they released it. There are still some problems with altitude display and navigation. They don’t bother me that much, but you may feel differently about it. The 5X is still actively supported and is from what I’ve read is more capable than the Epix. There’s not enough new for me to go out and buy one to replace my Epix, but if my Epix ever breaks, I’d buy a 5X immediately.
You did not mention integration with the Varia Rear Radar. One problem with the Edge 820 is it shows the Radar data but no audible, either from the unit or through headphones via bluetooth Connect to phone, which a Gamin rep claimed this unit now does.
My audible settings are on. It has never worked. I’m glad yours does, but the Garmin rep as much as said it would not provide an audible signal for the Varia. I would need the 1030 for that. Are you saying yours is audible and loud enough to be heard while riding?
Hi. I’ve been searching everywhere without finding an answer. Hope someone here can help.
I have two bikes. A roadbike and an mtb. Both have their own ant sensors.
Is it possible to set up the mountain bike profile to match with its sensors, and then know that its this equipment that is used.
All my rides in connect are registered with my road bike, no matter what profile and sensors used.
Best regards.
Lard5
I have two road bikes that I ride all the time. Both have Garmin Vector power pedals. When I ride Bike 1, the Edge 1030 senses the power meter for the first bike. When I ride Bike 2, it senses the power meter for the second bike. I have seen it sense both power meters in my garage, but only when I’ve “activiated” both by turning the pedals a few times. I use the same heart rate monitor strap all the time, so that is no problem. I also have Garmin Varia lights. I only use the lights on Bike 2, but If I mounted them on Bike 1, there’s no doubt in my mind that the Edge 1030 would work with them just fine.
Since the range of ANT+ sensors is about 3 meters (10 ft), there’s little chance of having a problem with the sensors from the “other” bike.
Hi Colin.
Thank You. :-) This is my experience with my 1030 and two bikes too, and my ant+ speed/cadance sensors.
But when it comes to what bike I’ve been using, it always choses my road bike. Then I later has to change bike under equipment in garmin connect. What I’m looking for is how to get my edge to know what bike I have been using, as they have different sensors.
I think I misunderstood your question! I don’t think Garmin Connect has the information to determine which bike you were riding for an activity. If you look at your “Gear”, one of your bikes is the “default” for cycling activities. I have had my Colnago as the default; today, I changed it to my Cannondale while experimenting.
It would be nice if the profile name from the Edge 1030 was included in the .FIT file. I name my profiles “Colnago17”, “Cdale17”, and “Trek17” for the bike and year. (So it’s time to add three new profiles. I’ll delete the 2017 profiles after January 1.)
I first wrote Danish support who thought it to be a great idea, so they refered me to Garmin ideas (link to www8.garmin.com)
So I wrote them my idea. Lets se if they¨ll do anything about it.
This is what I wrote:I have an edge 1030, an MTB and a road bike. On each of the bikes I have speed and cadence sensors that are set up and work. That is, the 1030s find them and register the correct speed, etc. But regardless of whether I have chosen. MTB profile or Road, everything will be recorded in connect as if I have driven my road bike. Is it not possible to get the two sets of ANT + sensors set up to detect which equipment / bike is used? I think it’s a lot of trouble that I always have get into Garmin connect to change equipment. I use equipment data to record how long each cycle has run between service, replacement of parts, etc. So it’s a good info to get automatic. And I do not move around on the sensors. Thanks in advance.
I think they could just use the profile used to record the ride. Tying it to the sensors would only work for some (for example on some of my bikes I have no sensors at all).
Hi Ray,
exhausting rewiev… ;) but/and detailed.. :D
I have the Garmin 1030 and had the Garmin 1000 until resently.
In the map settings I have four (4) different maps activated. Do they need to be activatet all of them? Do the unit choose between the maps according to the choosen activityprofile? Does it matter if they are all activated?
Are there any drawbacks by having them all activated?
Thank you if you have a couple of minuts to adress this question..
kind regards
/Sören
For the past 2-3 years, I’ve enjoyed the partnership of an Edge 1000 and S-Works Roubaix SL4 (Dura-Ace Di2). In order to display shifting data I had to add the Shimano “D-Fly module.”
In October, my house and everything in it, save me, my wife, our cat, and two cars were lost in the Sonoma County, CA wildfires. The very first thing I purchased with our first insurance check was a 2018 Specialized S-Works Roubaix with the newest Dura-Ace groupo, but my life has been so crazy because of the fires that THIS week (almost 3 months later) was my very first chance to ride it. I bought the Edge 1030. When I tried to pair sensors from the Di2, all that the computer recognized was the battery charge!
Now I read that there’s a Bluetooth module (EW-WU111) that makes more sensor data available to the 1030. Will that restore the experience I had previously? I don’t think it can completely, because on the previous generation Di2 the shifters had buttons on the lateral sides and top of the hoods, whereas there are only top buttons now.
The bike is a dream, by the way. My first experience with discs, which confounded me because the S-works bike has through axle forks rather than Quick Release, and that makes me REALLY nervous about mounting the bike on my Sea-Sucker rack!
Ray,
I just bought the new 1030 as my 1000 was starting to flake out (more like a year). I was wondering can I load all my data from my 1000 into my 1030 or am I starting anew? On my first ride I noticed the calorie counts was way high, like 1000 calories too high. Is this just a bug to be worked out or are others suffering too? BTW too bad Garmin did not create camera with the same form factor so one could sandwich/stack below the 1030 (use the mount to attach). I saw there is a 3rd party light coming out that does just that.
Since my bikes are an assemblage of various components from various sources which power meter would you recommend knowing that I use Campy or “other” cranks?
Thanks, I subscribe because your info is so valuable it has saved me tons avoiding mistakes. Happy New Year
The 1030 is like the 1000, in that you cannot set the totals to a certain number. I guess you could load activities that were done with the 1000 onto the 1030, but you probably have those saved on your computer and your Garmin Connect account, etc. You can, and would probably like to, load courses.
Theoretically, you can send files from the 1000 to the 1030, but I have never been able to get the 1000 to “discover” another 1000 or the 1030. Other people have told me this works for them.
You’ll have to set up your data screens manually, as far as I know.
For a power meter, consider the pedal based units, because that’s all you’d have to change. I also use Campy components, and I have Garmin Vector pedals, both v1 and V2. The Vector V3 model, just out, looks much more like a simple pedal (no “pods” to tell the world you’re a power freak).
They seem to have fixed the “it will only connect with Stages when mounted on top of the stem” issue I had with a circa 2016 520. Works fine on the front mount.
That’s key for me and its about time.
If you move from a 520 size to this size its also very noticeable how much easier it is to see the data. As a result it seems the actual amount of time spent looking at it (and not at the road) goes way down.
Finally, the touchscreen works and makes the 520 button-based selection process seem immediately dated.
Has anyone had trouble with the Emergency Contact list for Incident Detection? I had the Edge 1030 paired to my previous phone no problem, but it just screwed up big time with my new phone (Pixel 2).
I click to add my wife as emergency contact, but then the emergency contact list shows a different name from my phone’s contact list. Turns out, the Edge 1030 also sent messages to my entire list of contacts on my phone that they were added as an emergency contact. I’m pissed off that I’m having to reply to everyone asking why they got a message about being added as an emergency contact.
Software on Edge 1030 is 3.70. Phone app is 4.1.11. How can I trust turning incident detection back on? This is absolutely bizarre that it can message every number stored on my phone.
Update: Garmin hasn’t been able to duplicate it, so they requested a video. Since the app will crash without a data connection, I spammed my entire contacts list again trying to set a single emergency contact while filming. I hope Garmin can figure out a fix, because I’ll just have to leave emergency contacts and incident detection turned off.
Does anyone use wrist heart rate detection with the Edge 1030. It seems that Garmin’s own wrist-worn devices only sync with Garmin Mobile Connect and don’t sync realtime with the Edge. If the reviews were better, I’d try the Mio Link, but the reviews are sketchy, bordering on negative. Is the absence of BLE pairing between the Apple Watch and the Edge 1030 a battle about winning marketshare between the two companies rather than a true technical issues?
My wife once used a Mio wrist device with her Garmin Edge 1000 without any problems. You have to pair the Mio with the Garmin which is no problem. Problem with wrist devices is they are not that accurate and at one moment they seem stop working……. she had problems with the TomTom wrist device and her Mio wrist device. Now she also have a chest belt.
I use a Wahoo chest belt, paired with the Edge 1030 without any problems. In my opinion it should be strange a wrist device of another brand won’t work while a chest device of another brand will work well.
I just don’t like the constrictive feeling of the chest straps. I think it’s interesting that Garmin’s own wrist monitors won’t pair with the 1030. I have no idea why that is, unless they also think the wrist devices aren’t as accurate, but if that’s the case, why would they sell them. Perhaps the real-time continuous communication requires too much power. The only wrist-monitored heart rate monitoring I’ve experienced has come from the Apple Watch.
I don’t think the assertion is true. Garmin’s wrist based monitors should pair with Edges with ANT+ just like any other ANT+ strap. Some of the older Garmin’s with OHR had to be put into transmit mode and then couldn’t function independently, but from what I understand that’s no longer necessary with the latest models.
The AW has been measured to be the most accurate of the popular OHR’s compared to medical grade EKG’s (around 90%), but no where near the accuracy of a chest strap (99%).
As Paul said, all of Garmin’s wrist based optical HR sensors (save the very first one), pair with the Edge series just fine.
As for the Mio Link, it’s actually very good/accurate – but the company let itself down with the app, which is likely where some feelings come from. Though realistically, you don’t need the app for anything.
Thanks to you and Paul for correcting my misunderstanding of the Garmin wrist HR Sensors. I didn’t see that capability mentioned on Garmin’s website. Perhaps Garmin considers using a wrist-located activity monitor and a cycling computer simultaneously as redundant. I did not know that no wrist located monitor could match the accuracy of a chest strap, nor that the “AW” (which I assume means Apple Watch) was the most accurate of the wrist devices. Too bad Apple won’t (or perhaps can’t—I’m not sure which is the case) let it connect to other BLE devices like cycling computers. Do you have a favorite among wrist based devices?
I DO have an Apple watch, which I wear all the time, so I don’t need yet another device telling me the time of day. That’s one of the things that attracted me to the Mio Link (essentially no user interface; just an accurate source of information to be recorded by the Edge.
One thing that would be nice for Garman to add is some type of automated start to HR broadcasting, where when waking up the Edge or starting a bike ride your watch begins automatically broadcasting heart rate.
Unless I’m mistaken you need to manually switch the watch over to broadcast HR at the start of a ride, or just leave it in permanent broadcast mode which it sounds like significantly diminishes battery life?
Also permanent broadcasting HR may have some privacy risks.
After a few months of not so intensive use I must say tha, in spite of some initial doubts, I am really really happy with my Edge 1030, I think it is really fantastic and almost perfect for me. Today I discovered a weird thing: I seem to be able to pair it only with one iPhone. Once it’s paired with one device, the button to pair disappears, and I can’t add other phones. How’s that possible? It seem to me that it’s a huge design flaw. Or maybe a bug?
That doesn’t surprise me at all. There’s a master/slave concept in Bluetooth. One master can have many slaves, but a slave can only have one master. So only one iPhone. But that makes sense for this purpose, since most people only have one phone, and sharing an Edge among several users is problematic. If you were pairing Bluetooth sensors, where the 1030 would be master, you could probably pair as many as you want to the 1030, but those sensors couldn’t pair with any other device.
For the same reason, I always have to go through the trouble of unpairing one of my Bluetooth headphones from my iPhone whenever I want to switch it to my iPad. They can’t both share it like they could if ANT+ were being used.
I have two iPhones and an iPad. I don’t want to pair them all simultaneously, neither to share the Edge with other users, I just want to sync to Garmin Connect with whatever device I have handy. I can do that with the Vivoactive HR but I understand that in this case the phones are the masters. I suppose the Edge 1030 works the other way round for the other connected features as showing SMS. Incidentally, I don’t care too much about those, but such is life I guess.
Not necessarily. It would depend on the chipset the Apple Watch has in it, as it could also be in central mode. My guess is that since they are doing audio, they’d likely be using a full BT stack, allowing them to connect outbound to multiple devices.
But either way, that’d require Apple to actually care enough to allow HR broadcasting.
I believe that’s because the Apple Watch does not transmit HR using the Bluetooth HR profile in the way a Bluetooth HR strap would. I don’t know how it moves data back and forth to the iPhone, but I’d guess it’s all data packets, maybe proprietary formats or just TCP/IP over Bluetooth. I think they do prevent an AW from pairing with more than one iPhone at a time, although an iPhone can be paired with more than one AW.
Apple itself gets around this Bluetooth limitation with the AirPods somehow. As I understand it (I don’t have them because I don’t like in ear headphones), you can pair AirPods to any number of iOS or AW head units, and they seamlessly move between whatever you’re using at the moment. The Bluetooth standards people have been saying for years that they’re going to do something about the master/slave stuff, but they haven’t so far (or at least whatever they’ve created hasn’t been widely implemented). It’s there for security; you don’t want someone secretly pairing with your keyboard and reading your keystrokes, for example.
“you can pair AirPods to any number of iOS or AW head units, and they seamlessly move between whatever you’re using at the moment. ”
I don’t have AirPods (I can’t get the left one to stay in my ear), but I have the Beats X in-ear wireless phones which I’m told share the same chipset. My main gripe is that if I leave the headphones at home and later make or receive a call on my iPhone 7 Plus, the phone’s CPU still thinks it’s talking to the Beats device and I don’t hear that the call has wrung and connected. Usually I figure this out by looking at the iPhone screen and seeing the tiny headphone icon in the upper right corner of its screen, but that usually takes a few iterations of dead silence at both ends of the call.
Tom, I have the 820 and now also the 1030 – the 820 is now on my son’s bike…..so that’s my input. I would go for the 1030 for sure – the 820 is very nice though too, the 1030 is just better in every way I needed it to be.
My debate is between the 1000 on sale now for $299.99 or the 520 or Wahoo bolt at $249.99. Give me some opinions. Been using a fenix 3hr for awhile and want to upgrade my head unit to something I can see easier and with some mapping. Thanks for any opinions.
Hi Ray, thanks for this review.
I’m coming from Edge 820 in which I’ve 4 bikes linked with 4 different powermeters (2 road + 2 MTB). Now I’ve the brand new 1030 and I don’t know how to “pre-set” my 4 bikes in this new device. I really appreciate how to do that.
Thanks a lot in advance!
I’m not entirely sure I understand, but if you’re asking what I think, in short you have to re-pair/re-build all those bikes. Garmin doesn’t have any sort of backend device migration goodness. :(
Thanks Ray,
My point is the following: in the older device (edge 810), you can link (and memorize) differents bikes (each one with different powermeter) forever. I have 4 different bikes linked at the same time so, when switching, all the issue is to change the “Bike Profile” (the device memorize each bike activity in these 4 different “silos”)
Where is the “bike profile” setting in the new 1030? (or how I can link my 4 different bikes (and powermeters) in this new device?
Thanks a lot
Garmin changed this from the 1000 forward. There are activity profiles which store settings such as map settings, but no “bike” profiles. I’ve been trying to request bike profiles since the 1000 first came out (as have others), but it’s not going to happen.
So each time I change bikes, I manually select which ANT / BLE devices I want, and have to manually set the wheel size since I swap the same wheel sensor between bikes. It’s a bit of a pain, but I installed some type of notepad app from Connect and have a text file telling me the wheel size for each bike.
How does the 1030 estimates Calories Burned without heart rate data?
Probably not fair to the device, because I’m still on the fence regarding how I should ask the 1030 to measure my heart rate (I SO want to be freed from chest straps), but now that I’ve taken a few (flat) rides using the 1030, I’ve noticed that it claims I’m using twice the Calories i think is true (based on the results I used to get with my 1000 when it was assisted by heart rate data from a Garmin Strap (both the 1000 and the strap were lost, along with their and my home during the Sonoma County October firestorm, and I’m waiting for someone to rave about their wrist based heart monitor that DOES provide data to the 1030.
Does anyone know if I use the iOS Strava app on my iPhone 7 Plus whether it will use the iPhone’s internal heart rate monitor to calculate Caloric consumption
OOPS! I asked:
“Does anyone know if I use the iOS Strava app on my iPhone 7 Plus…”
I MEANT to ask
“Does anyone know if I use the iOS Strava app on my Gen 1 Apple WATCH” whether it will use the WATCH’s internal heart rate monitor to calculate Caloric consumption?
Jim, the 1030 doesn’t have bike profiles, it memorizes all your sensors and when you start riding it hooks up to any sensors it has saved that are transmitting. If you have someone riding one of your bikes while you are riding another, just make sure you activate the ones you are going to be using first with the 1030 powered up, and it should stay hooked up to those an not the second bike’s sensors. I personally find this much better than the old method because I can ride any of my bikes and it automatically hooks up without having to go choose a bike. This same method that is used in the 820 as well.
Has anyone else noted those embedded adds for the Motiv heart rate/sleep/activity tracker while following Garmin 1030 comments? Is that ad placement a teaser for future capabilities of the Motiv ring (currently, it connects ONLY to iOS devices and does not broadcast real-time heart rates (only averages per 60 second interval). I’d jump at truly accurate ring-based heart rate detection and broadcasting to my Garmin 1030, so long as the device wasn’t the size of an Imelda Marcos diamond (or a large walnut).
So I had been having problems with ride syncing. Here was my likely issue. I was using the 1030 on the indoor trainer for some time and I turned of the GPS. I had been trying to sync and it stopped working. Looking at a recent ride I notice the time and date of the ride was 14 days prior and hours off. Yesterday I finally went on a ride outside. I didn’t do anything special except use my outdoor profile which of course has GPS enabled. Recorded my ride from home to the BART and amazingly the ride showed up in Garmin connect.
No amount of resets worked. And when it started working on the ride yesterday, I didn’t connect the second BT connection at least not manually. Also during the ride I know it didn’t disconnect from the Garmin app because I kept getting crash notices when I stopped and tilted my bike slightly and my contact were getting able to follow my ride.
So I’m curious if there are some time bounds around which the data must be uploaded. Just throwing that out there in case someone it might help someone.
Only things I’m still having problems with are the Garmin remote dropping offline and unexpected pausing under trees cover with the Garmin speed sensor.
I have a Fenix 3HR and it works perfectly all the time. Been wearing it non-stop for a year and 3 months except when charging for a few hours once a week. It never has a problem syncing which is why it was a mystery about the 1030. But now with the corrected time, it uploads after ride completion without a hitch, even indoor rides.
The most interesting part is that the BT_Edge 1030 connection is not showing Connected. I am not sure of the purpose for that connection serves. I can still pretty reliably make the Garmin Connect app hang but at least the it uploads. I think there should be some messaging stating the need to turn on the GPS to update the time if it is off from the Garmin Connect app. There is obviously an issue there.
Hope this helped someone. And sorry for the bad grammar in the original post. Went to way to far into the red and it affected me mentally the entire next day. Next time I’ll wait 2 days to post.
have you heard anything from Garmin if they intend to change the stupid software glitch they have made in the edge 1030 that makes it impossible to choose to delete an activity after more than 13 km ??
for now the only way is to disable automatic upload :(
well i hate that design because i use my fenix 5X to track all activities and track VO2 max and so on because edge and fenix doesnt sync with eachother,so if i cannot discard the activity on my edge and it force uploads then i get 2 different activities in connect and all ather platforms linked to connect as well as a 2 different vo2 max values..
i love the edge 1030 but because of that stupid designed save only feature i allmost tend to leave the freakin thing at home
on all other devices you can allways select if you want to save or discard
It was reported back within the Garmin Forums that this is functioning by design (I’m not sure if the individual worked for Garmin or not). Unfortunately I don’t think it’s going to change. I’ve set Strava to ‘not public’ by default because of this and manually delete / mark public activities as needed.
I can confirm this is by design. The implementation was done to prevent users from accidentally deleting rides. I have passed on customers experience with the design and continue to report feedback to the Edge team.
might very well make me sell my edge 1030 and get something else :( one thing is they dont make their devices sync with eachother but they sure cant tell me that i am not allowed to delete/discard an activity
i want to have the choice myself
Shawn that is probably the most stupid decision garmin has made !!
if it was really needed then they should have just made two settings one with the discard/save setting and one without the discard setting
Totally disagree! Nice upgrade to me, so I won’t delete my ride accidentally when coming home and shutting down the device.
Why should you delete your ride after riding for over 13 km!?!? If so, you will be able to delete it afterwards in Garmin Connect and/or Strava. So don’t see the problem with this.
Which other device maker made their devices sync? As far as I know no one.
However it should be very handy indeed. But to sell my Garmin Edge for that reason?
Also of note is that VO2Max actually doesn’t sync across devices at this point. It can upload to Garmin Connect, but isn’t (yet) back-synced to other devices.
This is something I note since every new device I get I go through a few weeks of the VO2Max slowly rising.
Simply deleting the duplicate activity afterwards would remove the secondary VO2Max value. Note, as someone who records almost every ride on 2-3 Garmin devices for power meter comparison testing…it’s something I’m really familiar with. ;)
Hello Ray. Huge fan of your work. Have been using Garmin edge product for a long time. and most recently upgraded to the 1030. Very happy with the unit and its features. No problems at all. Using full sensors and communication options etc. Only concern has been my Edge remote, which presents the issues mentioned in the garmin forum page:
I don’t know if this will work for you, but you might try pairing it by using different combinations of 2 of the 3 remote buttons to enter pairing mode. Mine seemed to have some issues and I tried different buttons for pairing until it worked (I think it was the two non-programmable buttons). The remote did show different IDs upon pairing this way.
This might not have had anything to do with it at all, but would be worth testing since mine has magically stayed connected afterward.
wow OMG, somebody butchered that battery pack design…If you have few bikes you need to change the mounts…How about designing the pack so it seats in the mount and then you twist Garmin 1030 in to the battery pack, it would be compatible with all the mounts. I think I’m gonna design and print that on my 3D printer.
My Power Pack is supposed to arrive at my bike shop later today. I’m in Southern California. I ordered the battery pack at the same time as my Edge 1030, which I received on September 30.
Garmin has been saying that since the Power Pack contains a lithium ion battery, they cannot be shipped by air, so delivery times have slipped. (One wonders how big a surprise this could have been, and why the same doesn’t apply to the computers as well, since their battery is supposedly the same size as the Power Pack.)
The Garmin web site says the delivery time of the Power Pack is still 3 – 5 weeks as of this morning.
BikeTiresDirect also has the Charge Pack in stock. I ordered one yesterday. I was told earlier this month by my dealer they wouldn’t have them until February, but apparently they shipped and will now have it today.
I agree with @sebo that the mounting design is flawed and shortsighted. The charge pack should go between the 1030 and the mount. I use Barfly Garmin mounts with GoPro attachments below for lights (like the UT800, etc). Now I have to choose between using a battery or a light, or adding a second mount for the light (Ugh!).
They didn’t even have the foresight to think it thru for this of us who have their own UT800 light. You can use one or the other but not both. Doh!
But think about it. Garmin lights don’t have anything like the burn time they’d need if you were doing a 24 hour or longer ride. You would most likely want a different lighting solution for a ride where the Power Pack would keep your Edge going without interruption.
I also own the UT800 and two tail lights. Maybe I’ll try the headlight with a Jackery Mini feeding it, and see how long the head light lasts.
I have other lights too, including one that mounts to the rear of the UT800 body and feeds a cable into a half-frame bag for connection to a battery pack. The real point is I want to retain my GoPro mounting solution and not have to reconfigure my bike(s) when I decide to carry the charge pack.
I know this was posted 4 months ago but I have a question about the bluetooth smart on the unit. Did you test a power meter through bluetooth and how did it work? I paired my P1 pedals and it no longer shows torque effectiveness or pedal smoothness post ride. I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong. Info would be greatly appreciated.
That’s because Torque Effectiveness and Pedal Smoothness are ANT+ metrics, not BLE metrics. BLE doesn’t have a exact mirror of those metrics at this point that companies have adopted.
In general, unless something is broken you should pretty much always pair power meters specifically via ANT+ rather than Bluetooth Smart. At least for another year or two, until companies get a bit more standardized on stuff.
Thanks for these great reviews. I recently added a powertap to my road bike, and more recently upgraded to a G3. I’m still rocking my 705 and it still does great. But with the new hub and me using strava more. How much better is the 810/820/1000/1030 world than my works great 705? I like the idea that the new stuff will pay attention to segment starts/stops and the whole crash alert thing is cool. But in terms of tracking my PT metrics, does it matter?
In terms of your PT hub metrics, honestly, no, there’s zero difference there.
It’ll do stuff like calculate power zones and FTP better, as well as some training load aspects. And it’ll actually integrate with Strava (for Live Segments, as well as downloading routes from Strava to the unit directly). But if neither of those matter, then… buy a lot of ice cream instead?
The beta claimed to fix serious problems with the Garmin Remote essentially not working at all. It didn’t fix it. The temperature problem did get fixed.
I’m doing a first ride with 3.80 tomorrow. I hope it fixes the Remote problem, but I’m not all that hopeful, given they haven’t been able to make it very stable on the 1000 either in the years since it came out.
Now that Karoo v1.0 is a bust I’m back looking at alternatives.
Having read through all the posts here along with the Garmin forum and some scathing reviews elsewhere it is apparent there is a honeymoon phase with the 1030 followed by levels of disenchantment. Too many users have reported too many problems. That is ridiculous in a flagship product. While some issues are addressed in recent firmware updates (6 months later), I can’t see spending $600 for a flawed GPS. Perhaps Karoo 2 with mature software in 2019 or a future Garmin product will finally get things right. Until then it looks like the Wahoo BOLT offers the most bang for the buck with the least problems.
Every Garmin cycle computer has an extended teething period for its software. Not 6 months…longer! A future Garmin product will not get it right; rather, that will be more of a rinse and repeat scenario. After a while expect that the 1030 will more-or-less get it right…mostly (and expect old bugs to get reintroduced here and there). That is the nature of the Garmin universe. As a software engineer, I question their QA process (and wonder sometimes whether they even have a QA process).
I once had a Garmin Nuvi for my car that wouldn’t hold a charge for more than about 20 mins (out of 5 hrs claimed). Garmin customer support told me that’s because I had GPS turned on. Seriously. LOL
@Gabe “people come on the forums to complain not to praise.”
That’s not a bad thing? I think it’s great that people have a place to voice their criticisms and complaints, when the device they paid $600 for doesn’t work as advertised. I applaud Garmin for standing up a forum where such complaints can be made, and that they solicit and monitor that feedback.
I bought new a 810, 820, 1000 and 1030, as well as ANT+ accessories for each. Not one of the Edge worked out of the box as advertised, and Garmin needed some time to stabilize the software.
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Edge1030，Use the phone’s backlighting mode, brighter when lit, darker when dark
Temperature has started dipping into the 40s here in Northern NJ and I wore gloves for the 1st time with the 1030 in my last ride. They are Castelli Gaga midweight gloves with wind stopper tech and could not use the 1030 at all. The screen wouldn’t register my fingerprint at all to swipe or tap.
I don’t recall if the gloves worked w/ my 810 but I want to say that they did. That would be absurd though so maybe I’m wrong.
Same over here with Castelli and GribGrab gloves, both equiped with “touch-screen-fingerprints”. Doesn’t work at all. Happy with my Garmin remote……. however, use with gloves should be no problem in my opinion……..
Hi, picked up my 1030 today, upgraded from 810. I am trying to figure out how to load my different bikes (3) onto the profile for selection at start of ride as with the 810.
Are you able to give me some pointers?
Paul (South Africa)
Ahh, welcome to more recent devices!
Garmin has done away with bike profiles (as of a number of years ago). Instead, you’ve got activity profiles, and sensor pools. So basically, you’ll add in all the sensors from all your bikes. You can specify odometers there as well, and tweak as need be.
Activity profiles are aligned to things like road riding, racing, training, trainer, etc… Whatever you want them to be. You can customize those, and then you choose that based on the activity type. It’ll automatically find your bike based on the sensors on that bike as soon as you activate those sensors.
It’s a little quirky at first – but once you get the hang of it it’s much more flexible.
Is there any data to provide insight to AXS Red and Garmin 1030 capabilities? I’m trying to display my gears on my Garmin 1030 and have been struggling to make it work. Is this not possible for SRAM AXS Red and Garmin 1030?
link to sram.com
Any updates regarding Garmin integrating its advanced training metrics across its platform? It seems to me that this is a no-brainer as isolated metrics may present a misleading picture of fitness, recovery, etc. and thus are potentially harmful. Will Garmin ever integrate the advanced metrics into its older devices (for example, the Edge 820) or will they be limited to the 1030 and future models?
Need to get a remote if you want to use the device in the winter. Plus notifications can’t go away without touch
Obrigado pela excelente analise ao produto, antes de comprar li atentamente e deu muito jeito.
Quando recebo uma chama telefonica e vejo quem me liga, ou recebo sms, não consigo responder.
Será que esta funcionalidade só dá para quem também tem um Edge 1030?
Agradeço comentários da vossa experiência.
Obrigado,
Luís
Hi
i’ve just bought 1030 mostly for touring. Following your instructions for downloading open street maps to 1000, I think I’ve managed to put some maps of Chile & Argentina onto an SD card, via my Mac. But I can’t see anything on the 1030 or tell whether the maps are readable on the Garmin – how do I find the map ( once I’ve put SD card in the 1030) on to the garmin? Do I need to be in the location ( I’m in the UK)?
Also the map does not appear to be readable on my Mac, once I’ve downloaded via the email link from open street. I get message “gmapsupp.im g……no mountable file systems”
Any suggestions?
Thanks
Hi,
It is really a pity to see how Garmin products just suck from the software question. My point is… when the software is so buggy, then can the metrics about recovery time, ftp, etc. be considered as reliable?
8n the video below, I have noticed how the Bluetooth connection issue depends on the status of the Garmin Connect application on the phone: when it is open, then 1030 is connected, when it is closed, n9 way. However, you cannot keep the application open dur8ng a ride, as there must be some infinite loop in the code that makes the battery drain fast (and transforms the phone in a portable heater).
However, it is reall6 8nterest8ng to see that the connection issue is a bug solely related to the connection protocol of 1030, in fact if I switch on my 820 – and it will connect even witHout the application being open -, then even the 1030 connects!!!
link to youtu.be
Minor FYI, since it looks like you’re on iOS11…it’s crapped the bed across BT devices and connectivity across the board – not just limited to Garmin. The very latest version (11.2 on public beta) is much better, but I still get random drop-outs across any number of different vendors. May worth trying the beta to see if that solves your issue.
As for why the Edge 820 might stay connected but the Edge 1030 not? Again, the oddity with the iOS11 BT issues is that it’ll drop some connections but not others. I suspect there’s some very subtle things behind the scenes on how connections are coded that dictate that – but that’s beyond me. I can two watches and one drops connect and one doesn’t, and then later in the day they invert. :-/
I think it is all explained here: link to developer.apple.com
Most probably, the background handler which is awakened by the phone on the BLE connection supports the 820 but not the 1030 (yet). I believe this is an issue of Garmin Connect app, and not the 1030 itself…
As a developer – however – i’m Really shocked b6 the immaturity of the Garmin ecosystem. Also the IQ App Store reminds me the Symbian times.
Cheers,
Marco
The only trick is that for everyone else, the Edge 1030 connectivity does seem to work for tracking and such. For example, in the video demo you see up there about the friend tracking feature, I did that ride for over 2 hours with it tracking in my back pocket and not opened up. :/
After Apple’s newest iOS update last week, 11.1.1, I don’t have an issue keeping connection any longer. Well, at least not on the 2 rides I’ve done since. 11.1.2 is out now also.
Bonjour,
L’apple Watch 3 can pair with edge 1030 Like a Bluetooth sensor?
Thanks
The Edge 1030 would accept the Apple Watch, but alas, the Apple Watch doesn’t actually re-broadcast HR over Bluetooth Smart unfortunately as a standard BLE HR device.
Thanks. I Write to apple. :-)
I’d love to upgrade from my ancient Edge 800 to a 1030, but am wondering if the 1030 eliminates these 2 horrible design flaws that existed in the 800: (1) needing to set Turn Guidance ON for EVERY course downloaded into the unit, rather than having Turn Guidance as a settable global default, and (2) allowing changing the color of the course line that’s displayed during navigation, which is the awful magenta that is close to the color of many of the roads in the maps, thus creating much confusion.
Great review wonder if it is worth the buck seems that the Edge 1000 is god enough?
I think if you’re happy with the Edge 1000 – then you probably don’t need to upgrade unless there’s specific features on the Edge 1030 that are of significant value to you.
You have the best connections to Garmin and Strava…
Any indication that Strava /Garmin will lift their maximum amount of Strava Live Segments you’re able to copy on an Edge device?
A maximum of 100 Live Segments – sorry my language – sucks ‘solid spheres’!!
Without that change, need to stay with the Bolt.
Hi Ray,
Thanks for the review. My question is around the integration of PowerTap P1 and the Edge 1030. Is it possible to get the detailed pedal metrics for the P1 Pedals as you can now connect them via BLE? or will it still be standard power metrics
Thanks and keep up the great work,
Tim
Nah, it’s the same on either (no fancy metrics). PowerTap doesn’t transmit those in any standard format yet. See this for more though: link to dcrainmaker.com
Does anyone actually have a Garmin Charge Power Pack? (I asked on the forum a couple of days ago, and there have been no responses.)
I ordered the Edge 1030 & Power Pack at the same time, around announcement day. The Edge arrived on September 30, and has been in almost daily service since. The shop originally said the Power Pack was expected in a couple of weeks. After that couple of weeks, they said “in November”. Now November is 3/4 over, and there is no news on the Power Pack. Garmin’s Web site says it has a 5 – 8 week availablility. An email to Garmin Support a couple of weeks ago got the reply, “We know of no production problems; if you ordered today, it should arrive by January 18.”
I’m wondering if DCRainmaker’s unit is the only one Garmin ever produced, and whether this is a real product.
Weird. I’ll poke them and see what’s up.
As always thanks for the great review which encouraged me to get the 1030 and I’m enjoying the new features. Hoping you or someone may be able to help me with the following. I don’t always want to show the lap screen and with the Edge 1000 you could enable or disable a specific data screen. With the 1030, I only see “remove” which means that you have to recreate it each time. Am I missing a step? Or do I have to now create a new profile for these instances?
Congrats on the new addition to the family!
The Garmin Edge 1000 is a dog. The older Garmin 500 series were pretty solid but Garmin have gone downhill WRT quality big time. I went through a couple of 800s and then switched to a 1000. The features and functionality are amazing that all comes to nought because it’s a shockingly bad device. The touch screen either does not operate or, m ore likely, becomes so sensitive that drops of sweat or rain select things on the screen or cause it to detect to many touches so the screen locks. The two buttons at the bottom of the devices are ill-fitting and so rattle around even on the smoothest road (the only damn thing that rattles on my bike and I can’t do anything about it!). It’s also prone to software glitches where it will not start up or freezes on a certain screen. No amount of resetting will work, the only fix is to leave it and let the battery run dead.
I have had it “fixed” previously but the old issues eventually return. I was a massive Garmin fan and always thought that the premium price was worth it but no more. A cheap device will provide the functionality that you need at a fraction of the cost and with the reliability. For a little more money there are a stack of other devices that have almost all the functionality but are a stack more reliable.
I’d love to go out and confidently purchase the 1030 for myself for Christmas but these quality issues are making me think more than twice. After being a Garmin fan-boy for a long time, I think my next device (I am battling to reset my frozen Garmin again at the moment) may have to be a Wahoo or a Bryton.
Dave, It’s hard to imagine a more different evaluation of the Edge 1000 than yours and mine. I used the Edge 1000 for over 1400 activities, with very few problems. The cover over the On/Off button cracked, exposing the innards of the unit to dust or moisture, and I let that be my excuse to buy an Edge 1030 (heck, I would have bought it anyway). I let the hard drive fill up with rides, and started getting “corrupt” .FIT files, where dates and times were invalid – two or three years in the future. Removing my history regularly seems to have solved that glitch. I don’t have any issues with the Lap and Start buttons – no loose, not rattling, etc.
The Edge 1030 has over 50 activities on it already, and it has worked very well for me. I ran the battery for 20 hours and a few seconds, using Battery Save Mode, and had 17% battery life left. I’ve used Nav – no problems. I have Garmin Vector 2 pedals and Varia lights – both work fine. I did have to connect the power pedals a time or two – now, I turn the cranks three times as I turn the Edge on, and all is well.
I read on the forum that updating the software could cause settings to get lost, so I updated the software before doing anything else when I first got my Edge. I skipped from version 3.20 to 3.50, because I read that some issues weren’t fixed in 3.40.
I still can’t get my Edge 1000 and Edge 1030 to share files – I tried to copy a course over to the 1030, and I tried going the other direction, too. I never could get my Edge 1000 to share with a friend’s 1000 either, so I suspect my Edge 1000 of being the problem.
So, premium price aside, I think you could get an Edge 1030 and be happy with it. Either way, Merry Christmas!
Very much so. The last stable software I had was Edge 810 version 3.6, so 3 years ago??? 1030 issues are creeping up, and since they have yet to resolve prev model issues, and it is the same team, the best word that could describe their R&D is amateurism. My assessment is that they will never fix the issues because they lack the skillset to do so. Having users redo folders after loosing an nth ride data is silly.
Hello Ray, At firmware 3.50 is it stable already? Got to get this before Christmas….
I use it daily without much problem. The elevation bug was fixed back about a month ago.
In your opinion is the 1030 worth the extra over the 820?
Is the touchscreen on the 820 as bad as some people say it is, or does it seem to vary from unit to unit?
I would be using it mainly for tracking but also navigation leading club rides and for sportives.
Thanks in advance.
First, the Edge 820 touch screen. Commentary on it roughly falls into three camps:
A) Comments pre-Jan 2017: Discard these comments on issues seen, too much has changed since then in firmware updates.
B) Comments post-Jan 2017: Most peoples issues were fixed around then by software updates, with the exception of people that just had poor manuf displays, in which case they’re still finicky. Beyond that, I think some issues are legit, and some are more perception. People keep comparing it to a phone. But this isn’t a phone, the battery life is dramatically different and the conditions for usability are dramatically different. Sure, we’d love iPhone X touchability, but that’s not realistic for a handlebar device at this point.
C) Overall: I think the screen touchability is functional. Not fantastic, but pretty solid for a device that size. Still, over time I realize I do just prefer buttons on the Edge 520 – but that’s not really the same type of device.
RE: Edge 1030 vs 820
Totally depends on what you want the features for. For navigation and stuff there isn’t massive differences if you do planning prior to departing. If you do tracking of others mid-ride, then there’s more differences. Personally, I don’t much care on a day to day basis which device is on my handlebars, they both do the trick.
Just my two cents.
The 1030 touch screen doesn’t work with full finger gloves but no issue with bare skin
My Edge 1030 works just fine with gloves on. It’s important to set the touch sensitivity to high. Before I did that, it was “touch and go”, or “touchy” – well anyway, it only worked about half the time.
Excellent review!
I posted this in the Garmin forums too, but wanted to post here, since I was one of the early complainers.
Things seem to have been updated and at least for me, are working well so far.
I got out for some 4 hour rides over the weekend with my 1030 on Firmware 3.6 and the early issues I encountered in October seem to be fixed.
I upgraded to fw 3.6 and then did a system reset (just because).
1. Phone connection – hasn’t disconnected from my Google Pixel Android phone once yet.
2. Grade ( incline / decline ) – seems to be working fine now. Matched the readings on my 1000. (I read from -3 to 10%)
3. Using a speed sensor, the distance matched exactly with my 1000, no dropouts.
4. Remote stayed connected the entire 4 hours.
-Note: When I FIRST connected it (to both the 1000 and 1030) the 1030 gave it a different deviceID and disconnected once. I removed it from the list and re-added it and the deviceID matched and stayed connected). I think this might depend on which two buttons you hold on the remote to sync it? I used the two non-blue buttons last time.
5. Battery life – with ant+ sensors and phone connected, and backlight set to 15 second timeout (would view it now and then) – I got almost 5% per hour, compared to 10% with the Edge 1000.
6. Touch screen with gloves. I wore some light winter gloves (not touch compatible) – they worked fine on the 1000 and sometimes took a few swipes on the 1030. If I pressed a little harder it was fine. However the 1030 has a ‘sensitivity’ setting that I didn’t see until afterward. I set it to high, and didn’t notice much difference between the 1000 and 1030.
7. Screen – I head initially complained big time about this. However, I was running completely custom maps and the shaded background I’d used did not work well in the woods. This was partially my own fault. This time I used the built in OSM, then used free topo maps from gpsfiledepot, both looked fine in the woods, even with shaded relief turned on. I then overlaid a custom transparent map of my trails, and ran both the Edge 1000 and 1030 through a day / night ride in the woods. They both looked nearly the same and both read fine. I had an easier time reading the 1030 this time around. The little bit of extra size actually makes the trails easier to distinguish.
The only difference from my Edge 1000 and Vivoactive is, where they estimated 1950 calories burned, the 1030 showed 1500. I don’t pay a lot of attention to that. Maybe there’s a setting somewhere (I thought I’d synced them) – or a difference in the logic used.
In all, everything seemed to work great.
I have mainly one question, is it worth upgrading from 1000? – just recently upgraded my 910XT to 935 and like the new metrics with recovery, race paces and VO2 max values. However, I like a bigger screen for cycling. Do talk “communicate” through Garmin Connect so that my cycling vo2 max is updated on my 935 when using the 1030 for cycling?
yes/no to answer your questions.
Thanks for posting the very nice indepth review.
I have a question regarding the navigation and, as a Garmin 810 user with Garmin’s maps, I’ve been ‘ticked off’ with Garmin’s inability to navigate a route that has a loop in it, say like a figure 8. I even entered these routes into the 810 via Garmin Connect on the PC and uploaded to the unit. The issue was that it wouldn’t correctly navigate the route until you’d passed the final part of the route that had the loop in it.
Do you know if Garmin changed how they handle routing in situations like this?
New 1030 user coming from a 820. The difference in screen quality is huge. Much brighter and of course easier to see thanks to its size. For the moment only a couple of rides but more than happy with the change.
Thanks for the great review. As always, the deepest one available covering all aspects.
Unfortunately a comparison table to edge 1000, 820 is missing, which would be useful for me.
Plus:
How does the battery life behaves in cold weather (0 to 15 degrees celsius ) or when routing is on? Is it possible to charge the battery while the device is running via a standard usb powerbank?
I rather want to use a solid versatile applicable usb-powerbank, than a specific and expensive Garmin battery.
Hmm, no idea why I don’t have a table up there…but in any case, here’s a table: link to dcrainmaker.com
You can charge the battery mid-ride with any standard USB battery pack – no issues there.
Ray, one small correction to your table: 1000 has crash detection (Cycling section says it doesn’t).
Also, two questions:
Question 1: In the Connectivity section of your table, what do you mean by “Emergency/SOS Message Notification (From Watch To Contacts)” ?
Question 2: In the 1030, did Garmin fix the font size problem they introduced sometime after the 810? (Not complaining about data labels, but the data that is generated / displayed under the label, in the data field.) With my old 810, they used decently large fonts in data fields, though they truncated the data if it exceeded the available space. After that (or at least, with the 1000), they started using much smaller fonts in data fields.
For me, this problem is particularly bothersome when one chooses to display “Navigation / Location at Next” — on the 1000, even if the Location (course point) name is short, the data font is TINY, regardless of how short or long the Location name is. The text is too small for my post-40 eyes.
Thanks,
Gary
> Ray, one small correction to your table: 1000 has crash detection (Cycling section says it doesn’t).
I think you’ll find the Edge 1000 doesn’t have the hardware for it. I believe the Edge Touring and Edge Explore 1000 do.
Karl is correct, the Edge 1000 lacks the hardware in it. The other variants do, as they came out a year later.
The Emergency/SOS feature was related to some units that are no longer available (Bia primarily) that had cellular connectivity in it. Actually, Apple Watch has that now too.
I’m not sure I entirely understand the issue, but I haven’t seen anything truncated on the 1030.
My error re crash detection: I was thinking of the 1000 Explore, which is what I bought when my 810 died.
Re truncating: let me re-phrase: The issue is that when one customizes a Data Screen to include a parameter that is text, the 1000 Explore displays that text in a VERY small font — hard to read for post-40 eyes. I’m guessing Garmin chose a small font in order to fit a long text string into the space provided.
They had a better solution on my prior Garmin (810): the text was much larger than on the 1000 Explore, and if the text string was too long, the 810 truncated it to fit in the space. Even if you didn’t see the whole string, old guys like me could at least read the text — vs. not being able to read a long (or short) text string on the 1000 Explore.
So my question is: how does the 1030 display text data? (The data field I’m most interested in is “Navigation / Location at Next” — which is labeled “Next Point” when it is included on a Data Screen. It shows the name of the course point that is coming up next on a course you have downloaded to the device.)
Is it possible to enable ClimbPro WITHOUT loading a course first? Like the 1040’s etc? Or a workaround et
No, sadly not – only the x40 series (540/840/1040).
For those out there that own a 820 I will tell you some bad news.
This is the device that you should have purchased.
IMO the 820 was one of the worst executed hardware by Garmin. That was the touch screen and the size of the screen and calling it an 800 series.
So i will advise you folks to sell your 520s.
The 1030 has been solid. It does have some faults but it’s a great purchase over the 820. aka 520.
I am still having trouble with my 1030 and BT_Edge 1030. iPhone X. Latest iOS and Edge software. No problem pairing but have to manually force the connection. Doesn’t want to stay connected and won’t sync with Garmin Connect via the iPhone at the end of a ride unless I manually force the connection again. Whether Garmin Connect is open or not doesn’t seem to make any difference. Are others still having this problem?
Fwiw, I use it with an iPhone X, and though I haven’t done any live tracking lately with it, I haven’t seen any post-ride upload issues either.
Have you tried totally resetting everything Bluetooth-wise? There’s a little paragraph I wrote somewhere up early (like, early September) in the comments section on how to do it. There’s a bit more nuance than it might seem, so doing all the steps usually seems to help.
I remember the little paragraph, but have been trying to avoid going that route for several reasons. First I thought it related more to getting the iPhone and the 1030 paired, which hasn’t been a problem; second, I thought with all of us Garmin beta testers out there ? that Garmin might finally come up with a solution to the problem so that my 1030 would upload, etc. just like my 810; and third, I wasn’t sure what other things I would have to reset if I went that route. Not too worried about this last now, but just got a new version of the 1030 system software, which seems to hold the BT_Edge connection better, but still no automatic connect. I’m going to try it out a bit longer and see what happens. If uploading remains a problem, I’ll try the instructions in the little paragraph. Many thanks for the quick response.
i have the Edge 1000 now and will soon get the 1030 so the review was very helpful. I also have the Garmin Radar unit which works fine except the beep on the 1000 when traffic is approaching is barely audible and is even less audible in windy conditions. I have tried a different mount (the old one that does not extend or anything) which helps a bit but not much. Any suggestions that you have other than Garmin increasing the volume on the Edge–they say the speaker is directly above the mount which reduces the volume
I also just got the Varia taillight unit and it works fine with the 1030, but haven’t really paid attention to the beep, preferring to watch the display instead. In that regard, the out front mount is a huge improvement over the old one for me from a visibility standpoint. So no suggestions on how to improve the beep. I did notice that it sometimes loses track of vehicles that are up really close so it’s not a substitute for looking over your shoulder. It also had a nervous breakdown when I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on the sidewalk–too many cars passing too quickly. Froze but was able to fix by just stopping the ride on the other side of bridge and starting it again.
I am also now running the latest software version (3.70.0.0), and it seems it may have addressed my BT_Edge 1030 connection issues. But not sure yet. Need some more “beta” testing.
Follow up to last post. It appears that the latest update to the 1030 software has corrected the bluetooth connection/upload issues. Last two rides connection worked fine. Keeping my fingers crossed.
Further followup. BT_Edge 1030 still not connecting unless manually. Would be nice if Garmin fixed this.
I ski in winter and bike/climb in summer. Do you think I could use 1030 for my ski touring and mountaineering trips? I mean, I know it is expensive but I hope I could have one unit for my whole year activities.
You can certainly use it, but it’s not designed for that, so it won’t be ideal. I used an Edge 705 for a while when cross country skiing. The biggest problem was where to keep it. I think there are Garmin quarter turn wrist mounts that can be used with a 1030, but it’s really to big and clunky to mount on your wrist. (I’d be afraid of catching it on something.) I kept my 705 in a pocket in my anorak or in my Camelbak, and if I wanted to see it, I’d have to stop go through the trouble of taking it out. It certainly recorded the data and the track without any problem, it was just not an ideal form factor for the purpose. Nowadays I use an Epix for skiing. It’s mounted on my wrist outside my clothing and immediately visible without stopping, and I have an Edge 1000 for cycling.
Than you Paul. Epix looks fantastic!
Before you decide on that, you should take a look at the Fenix 5X, its successor. The Epix wasn’t supported well by Garmin and was effectively abandoned 6 months after they released it. There are still some problems with altitude display and navigation. They don’t bother me that much, but you may feel differently about it. The 5X is still actively supported and is from what I’ve read is more capable than the Epix. There’s not enough new for me to go out and buy one to replace my Epix, but if my Epix ever breaks, I’d buy a 5X immediately.
You did not mention integration with the Varia Rear Radar. One problem with the Edge 820 is it shows the Radar data but no audible, either from the unit or through headphones via bluetooth Connect to phone, which a Gamin rep claimed this unit now does.
My 820 has an audible alarm for the rear Varia Radar – if your’s doesn’t it’s probably turned off in settings.
My audible settings are on. It has never worked. I’m glad yours does, but the Garmin rep as much as said it would not provide an audible signal for the Varia. I would need the 1030 for that. Are you saying yours is audible and loud enough to be heard while riding?
Yes, loud enough for other riders in front / behind or on my side to hear also
Hi. I’ve been searching everywhere without finding an answer. Hope someone here can help.
I have two bikes. A roadbike and an mtb. Both have their own ant sensors.
Is it possible to set up the mountain bike profile to match with its sensors, and then know that its this equipment that is used.
All my rides in connect are registered with my road bike, no matter what profile and sensors used.
Best regards.
Lard5
I have two road bikes that I ride all the time. Both have Garmin Vector power pedals. When I ride Bike 1, the Edge 1030 senses the power meter for the first bike. When I ride Bike 2, it senses the power meter for the second bike. I have seen it sense both power meters in my garage, but only when I’ve “activiated” both by turning the pedals a few times. I use the same heart rate monitor strap all the time, so that is no problem. I also have Garmin Varia lights. I only use the lights on Bike 2, but If I mounted them on Bike 1, there’s no doubt in my mind that the Edge 1030 would work with them just fine.
Since the range of ANT+ sensors is about 3 meters (10 ft), there’s little chance of having a problem with the sensors from the “other” bike.
Hi Colin.
Thank You. :-) This is my experience with my 1030 and two bikes too, and my ant+ speed/cadance sensors.
But when it comes to what bike I’ve been using, it always choses my road bike. Then I later has to change bike under equipment in garmin connect. What I’m looking for is how to get my edge to know what bike I have been using, as they have different sensors.
I think I misunderstood your question! I don’t think Garmin Connect has the information to determine which bike you were riding for an activity. If you look at your “Gear”, one of your bikes is the “default” for cycling activities. I have had my Colnago as the default; today, I changed it to my Cannondale while experimenting.
It would be nice if the profile name from the Edge 1030 was included in the .FIT file. I name my profiles “Colnago17”, “Cdale17”, and “Trek17” for the bike and year. (So it’s time to add three new profiles. I’ll delete the 2017 profiles after January 1.)
I first wrote Danish support who thought it to be a great idea, so they refered me to Garmin ideas (link to www8.garmin.com)
So I wrote them my idea. Lets se if they¨ll do anything about it.
This is what I wrote:I have an edge 1030, an MTB and a road bike. On each of the bikes I have speed and cadence sensors that are set up and work. That is, the 1030s find them and register the correct speed, etc. But regardless of whether I have chosen. MTB profile or Road, everything will be recorded in connect as if I have driven my road bike. Is it not possible to get the two sets of ANT + sensors set up to detect which equipment / bike is used? I think it’s a lot of trouble that I always have get into Garmin connect to change equipment. I use equipment data to record how long each cycle has run between service, replacement of parts, etc. So it’s a good info to get automatic. And I do not move around on the sensors. Thanks in advance.
I think they could just use the profile used to record the ride. Tying it to the sensors would only work for some (for example on some of my bikes I have no sensors at all).
Hi Ray,
exhausting rewiev… ;) but/and detailed.. :D
I have the Garmin 1030 and had the Garmin 1000 until resently.
In the map settings I have four (4) different maps activated. Do they need to be activatet all of them? Do the unit choose between the maps according to the choosen activityprofile? Does it matter if they are all activated?
Are there any drawbacks by having them all activated?
Thank you if you have a couple of minuts to adress this question..
kind regards
/Sören
For the past 2-3 years, I’ve enjoyed the partnership of an Edge 1000 and S-Works Roubaix SL4 (Dura-Ace Di2). In order to display shifting data I had to add the Shimano “D-Fly module.”
In October, my house and everything in it, save me, my wife, our cat, and two cars were lost in the Sonoma County, CA wildfires. The very first thing I purchased with our first insurance check was a 2018 Specialized S-Works Roubaix with the newest Dura-Ace groupo, but my life has been so crazy because of the fires that THIS week (almost 3 months later) was my very first chance to ride it. I bought the Edge 1030. When I tried to pair sensors from the Di2, all that the computer recognized was the battery charge!
Now I read that there’s a Bluetooth module (EW-WU111) that makes more sensor data available to the 1030. Will that restore the experience I had previously? I don’t think it can completely, because on the previous generation Di2 the shifters had buttons on the lateral sides and top of the hoods, whereas there are only top buttons now.
The bike is a dream, by the way. My first experience with discs, which confounded me because the S-works bike has through axle forks rather than Quick Release, and that makes me REALLY nervous about mounting the bike on my Sea-Sucker rack!
Thanks so much.
Ray,
I just bought the new 1030 as my 1000 was starting to flake out (more like a year). I was wondering can I load all my data from my 1000 into my 1030 or am I starting anew? On my first ride I noticed the calorie counts was way high, like 1000 calories too high. Is this just a bug to be worked out or are others suffering too? BTW too bad Garmin did not create camera with the same form factor so one could sandwich/stack below the 1030 (use the mount to attach). I saw there is a 3rd party light coming out that does just that.
Since my bikes are an assemblage of various components from various sources which power meter would you recommend knowing that I use Campy or “other” cranks?
Thanks, I subscribe because your info is so valuable it has saved me tons avoiding mistakes. Happy New Year
The 1030 is like the 1000, in that you cannot set the totals to a certain number. I guess you could load activities that were done with the 1000 onto the 1030, but you probably have those saved on your computer and your Garmin Connect account, etc. You can, and would probably like to, load courses.
Theoretically, you can send files from the 1000 to the 1030, but I have never been able to get the 1000 to “discover” another 1000 or the 1030. Other people have told me this works for them.
You’ll have to set up your data screens manually, as far as I know.
For a power meter, consider the pedal based units, because that’s all you’d have to change. I also use Campy components, and I have Garmin Vector pedals, both v1 and V2. The Vector V3 model, just out, looks much more like a simple pedal (no “pods” to tell the world you’re a power freak).
They seem to have fixed the “it will only connect with Stages when mounted on top of the stem” issue I had with a circa 2016 520. Works fine on the front mount.
That’s key for me and its about time.
If you move from a 520 size to this size its also very noticeable how much easier it is to see the data. As a result it seems the actual amount of time spent looking at it (and not at the road) goes way down.
Finally, the touchscreen works and makes the 520 button-based selection process seem immediately dated.
Has anyone had trouble with the Emergency Contact list for Incident Detection? I had the Edge 1030 paired to my previous phone no problem, but it just screwed up big time with my new phone (Pixel 2).
I click to add my wife as emergency contact, but then the emergency contact list shows a different name from my phone’s contact list. Turns out, the Edge 1030 also sent messages to my entire list of contacts on my phone that they were added as an emergency contact. I’m pissed off that I’m having to reply to everyone asking why they got a message about being added as an emergency contact.
Software on Edge 1030 is 3.70. Phone app is 4.1.11. How can I trust turning incident detection back on? This is absolutely bizarre that it can message every number stored on my phone.
Update: Garmin hasn’t been able to duplicate it, so they requested a video. Since the app will crash without a data connection, I spammed my entire contacts list again trying to set a single emergency contact while filming. I hope Garmin can figure out a fix, because I’ll just have to leave emergency contacts and incident detection turned off.
Does anyone use wrist heart rate detection with the Edge 1030. It seems that Garmin’s own wrist-worn devices only sync with Garmin Mobile Connect and don’t sync realtime with the Edge. If the reviews were better, I’d try the Mio Link, but the reviews are sketchy, bordering on negative. Is the absence of BLE pairing between the Apple Watch and the Edge 1030 a battle about winning marketshare between the two companies rather than a true technical issues?
My wife once used a Mio wrist device with her Garmin Edge 1000 without any problems. You have to pair the Mio with the Garmin which is no problem. Problem with wrist devices is they are not that accurate and at one moment they seem stop working……. she had problems with the TomTom wrist device and her Mio wrist device. Now she also have a chest belt.
I use a Wahoo chest belt, paired with the Edge 1030 without any problems. In my opinion it should be strange a wrist device of another brand won’t work while a chest device of another brand will work well.
I just don’t like the constrictive feeling of the chest straps. I think it’s interesting that Garmin’s own wrist monitors won’t pair with the 1030. I have no idea why that is, unless they also think the wrist devices aren’t as accurate, but if that’s the case, why would they sell them. Perhaps the real-time continuous communication requires too much power. The only wrist-monitored heart rate monitoring I’ve experienced has come from the Apple Watch.
I don’t think the assertion is true. Garmin’s wrist based monitors should pair with Edges with ANT+ just like any other ANT+ strap. Some of the older Garmin’s with OHR had to be put into transmit mode and then couldn’t function independently, but from what I understand that’s no longer necessary with the latest models.
The AW has been measured to be the most accurate of the popular OHR’s compared to medical grade EKG’s (around 90%), but no where near the accuracy of a chest strap (99%).
As Paul said, all of Garmin’s wrist based optical HR sensors (save the very first one), pair with the Edge series just fine.
As for the Mio Link, it’s actually very good/accurate – but the company let itself down with the app, which is likely where some feelings come from. Though realistically, you don’t need the app for anything.
Thanks to you and Paul for correcting my misunderstanding of the Garmin wrist HR Sensors. I didn’t see that capability mentioned on Garmin’s website. Perhaps Garmin considers using a wrist-located activity monitor and a cycling computer simultaneously as redundant. I did not know that no wrist located monitor could match the accuracy of a chest strap, nor that the “AW” (which I assume means Apple Watch) was the most accurate of the wrist devices. Too bad Apple won’t (or perhaps can’t—I’m not sure which is the case) let it connect to other BLE devices like cycling computers. Do you have a favorite among wrist based devices?
I DO have an Apple watch, which I wear all the time, so I don’t need yet another device telling me the time of day. That’s one of the things that attracted me to the Mio Link (essentially no user interface; just an accurate source of information to be recorded by the Edge.
One thing that would be nice for Garman to add is some type of automated start to HR broadcasting, where when waking up the Edge or starting a bike ride your watch begins automatically broadcasting heart rate.
Unless I’m mistaken you need to manually switch the watch over to broadcast HR at the start of a ride, or just leave it in permanent broadcast mode which it sounds like significantly diminishes battery life?
Also permanent broadcasting HR may have some privacy risks.
After a few months of not so intensive use I must say tha, in spite of some initial doubts, I am really really happy with my Edge 1030, I think it is really fantastic and almost perfect for me. Today I discovered a weird thing: I seem to be able to pair it only with one iPhone. Once it’s paired with one device, the button to pair disappears, and I can’t add other phones. How’s that possible? It seem to me that it’s a huge design flaw. Or maybe a bug?
cheers
Gennaro
That doesn’t surprise me at all. There’s a master/slave concept in Bluetooth. One master can have many slaves, but a slave can only have one master. So only one iPhone. But that makes sense for this purpose, since most people only have one phone, and sharing an Edge among several users is problematic. If you were pairing Bluetooth sensors, where the 1030 would be master, you could probably pair as many as you want to the 1030, but those sensors couldn’t pair with any other device.
For the same reason, I always have to go through the trouble of unpairing one of my Bluetooth headphones from my iPhone whenever I want to switch it to my iPad. They can’t both share it like they could if ANT+ were being used.
I have two iPhones and an iPad. I don’t want to pair them all simultaneously, neither to share the Edge with other users, I just want to sync to Garmin Connect with whatever device I have handy. I can do that with the Vivoactive HR but I understand that in this case the phones are the masters. I suppose the Edge 1030 works the other way round for the other connected features as showing SMS. Incidentally, I don’t care too much about those, but such is life I guess.
Paul S. wrote:
“There’s a master/slave concept in Bluetooth. One master can have many slaves, but a slave can only have one master. So only one iPhone.”
Is THAT the fundamental reason Apple says the Apple Watch cannot transmit heart rate to devices such as the 1030?
Jim Robertson
Not necessarily. It would depend on the chipset the Apple Watch has in it, as it could also be in central mode. My guess is that since they are doing audio, they’d likely be using a full BT stack, allowing them to connect outbound to multiple devices.
But either way, that’d require Apple to actually care enough to allow HR broadcasting.
I believe that’s because the Apple Watch does not transmit HR using the Bluetooth HR profile in the way a Bluetooth HR strap would. I don’t know how it moves data back and forth to the iPhone, but I’d guess it’s all data packets, maybe proprietary formats or just TCP/IP over Bluetooth. I think they do prevent an AW from pairing with more than one iPhone at a time, although an iPhone can be paired with more than one AW.
Apple itself gets around this Bluetooth limitation with the AirPods somehow. As I understand it (I don’t have them because I don’t like in ear headphones), you can pair AirPods to any number of iOS or AW head units, and they seamlessly move between whatever you’re using at the moment. The Bluetooth standards people have been saying for years that they’re going to do something about the master/slave stuff, but they haven’t so far (or at least whatever they’ve created hasn’t been widely implemented). It’s there for security; you don’t want someone secretly pairing with your keyboard and reading your keystrokes, for example.
Paul S stated
“you can pair AirPods to any number of iOS or AW head units, and they seamlessly move between whatever you’re using at the moment. ”
I don’t have AirPods (I can’t get the left one to stay in my ear), but I have the Beats X in-ear wireless phones which I’m told share the same chipset. My main gripe is that if I leave the headphones at home and later make or receive a call on my iPhone 7 Plus, the phone’s CPU still thinks it’s talking to the Beats device and I don’t hear that the call has wrung and connected. Usually I figure this out by looking at the iPhone screen and seeing the tiny headphone icon in the upper right corner of its screen, but that usually takes a few iterations of dead silence at both ends of the call.
I need an advice. I want to buy garmin edge 820 or 1030. I know about the devices. What would you buy and what is your recommendation?
Thank you
Tom, I have the 820 and now also the 1030 – the 820 is now on my son’s bike…..so that’s my input. I would go for the 1030 for sure – the 820 is very nice though too, the 1030 is just better in every way I needed it to be.
I would by the 1030.
Tom, now I have given you as much information as you have given us about what your needs are.
My debate is between the 1000 on sale now for $299.99 or the 520 or Wahoo bolt at $249.99. Give me some opinions. Been using a fenix 3hr for awhile and want to upgrade my head unit to something I can see easier and with some mapping. Thanks for any opinions.
Hi Ray, thanks for this review.
I’m coming from Edge 820 in which I’ve 4 bikes linked with 4 different powermeters (2 road + 2 MTB). Now I’ve the brand new 1030 and I don’t know how to “pre-set” my 4 bikes in this new device. I really appreciate how to do that.
Thanks a lot in advance!
Josemaria
Hi Jose-
I’m not entirely sure I understand, but if you’re asking what I think, in short you have to re-pair/re-build all those bikes. Garmin doesn’t have any sort of backend device migration goodness. :(
Thanks Ray,
My point is the following: in the older device (edge 810), you can link (and memorize) differents bikes (each one with different powermeter) forever. I have 4 different bikes linked at the same time so, when switching, all the issue is to change the “Bike Profile” (the device memorize each bike activity in these 4 different “silos”)
Where is the “bike profile” setting in the new 1030? (or how I can link my 4 different bikes (and powermeters) in this new device?
Thanks a lot
Garmin changed this from the 1000 forward. There are activity profiles which store settings such as map settings, but no “bike” profiles. I’ve been trying to request bike profiles since the 1000 first came out (as have others), but it’s not going to happen.
So each time I change bikes, I manually select which ANT / BLE devices I want, and have to manually set the wheel size since I swap the same wheel sensor between bikes. It’s a bit of a pain, but I installed some type of notepad app from Connect and have a text file telling me the wheel size for each bike.
Thx a lot Zach !!
Appreciated
It’s a pity this kind of step back…
:-(
How does the 1030 estimates Calories Burned without heart rate data?
Probably not fair to the device, because I’m still on the fence regarding how I should ask the 1030 to measure my heart rate (I SO want to be freed from chest straps), but now that I’ve taken a few (flat) rides using the 1030, I’ve noticed that it claims I’m using twice the Calories i think is true (based on the results I used to get with my 1000 when it was assisted by heart rate data from a Garmin Strap (both the 1000 and the strap were lost, along with their and my home during the Sonoma County October firestorm, and I’m waiting for someone to rave about their wrist based heart monitor that DOES provide data to the 1030.
Does anyone know if I use the iOS Strava app on my iPhone 7 Plus whether it will use the iPhone’s internal heart rate monitor to calculate Caloric consumption
I use the Scosche monitor on my arm with the 1030 and 1000 before that. Works great as heart monitor. I don’t follow the calories metric.
OOPS! I asked:
“Does anyone know if I use the iOS Strava app on my iPhone 7 Plus…”
I MEANT to ask
“Does anyone know if I use the iOS Strava app on my Gen 1 Apple WATCH” whether it will use the WATCH’s internal heart rate monitor to calculate Caloric consumption?
Jim, the 1030 doesn’t have bike profiles, it memorizes all your sensors and when you start riding it hooks up to any sensors it has saved that are transmitting. If you have someone riding one of your bikes while you are riding another, just make sure you activate the ones you are going to be using first with the 1030 powered up, and it should stay hooked up to those an not the second bike’s sensors. I personally find this much better than the old method because I can ride any of my bikes and it automatically hooks up without having to go choose a bike. This same method that is used in the 820 as well.
Has anyone else noted those embedded adds for the Motiv heart rate/sleep/activity tracker while following Garmin 1030 comments? Is that ad placement a teaser for future capabilities of the Motiv ring (currently, it connects ONLY to iOS devices and does not broadcast real-time heart rates (only averages per 60 second interval). I’d jump at truly accurate ring-based heart rate detection and broadcasting to my Garmin 1030, so long as the device wasn’t the size of an Imelda Marcos diamond (or a large walnut).
So I had been having problems with ride syncing. Here was my likely issue. I was using the 1030 on the indoor trainer for some time and I turned of the GPS. I had been trying to sync and it stopped working. Looking at a recent ride I notice the time and date of the ride was 14 days prior and hours off. Yesterday I finally went on a ride outside. I didn’t do anything special except use my outdoor profile which of course has GPS enabled. Recorded my ride from home to the BART and amazingly the ride showed up in Garmin connect.
No amount of resets worked. And when it started working on the ride yesterday, I didn’t connect the second BT connection at least not manually. Also during the ride I know it didn’t disconnect from the Garmin app because I kept getting crash notices when I stopped and tilted my bike slightly and my contact were getting able to follow my ride.
So I’m curious if there are some time bounds around which the data must be uploaded. Just throwing that out there in case someone it might help someone.
Only things I’m still having problems with are the Garmin remote dropping offline and unexpected pausing under trees cover with the Garmin speed sensor.
i confirm i’m experiencing the same issue uploading.
are you also using another garmin unit by chance? i’m wondering if there is a conflict..
It will upload if you plug it to the computer.
I have a Fenix 3HR and it works perfectly all the time. Been wearing it non-stop for a year and 3 months except when charging for a few hours once a week. It never has a problem syncing which is why it was a mystery about the 1030. But now with the corrected time, it uploads after ride completion without a hitch, even indoor rides.
The most interesting part is that the BT_Edge 1030 connection is not showing Connected. I am not sure of the purpose for that connection serves. I can still pretty reliably make the Garmin Connect app hang but at least the it uploads. I think there should be some messaging stating the need to turn on the GPS to update the time if it is off from the Garmin Connect app. There is obviously an issue there.
Hope this helped someone. And sorry for the bad grammar in the original post. Went to way to far into the red and it affected me mentally the entire next day. Next time I’ll wait 2 days to post.
Hi Ray
have you heard anything from Garmin if they intend to change the stupid software glitch they have made in the edge 1030 that makes it impossible to choose to delete an activity after more than 13 km ??
for now the only way is to disable automatic upload :(
Hmm, I’ve never tried to discard an activity that long to be honest, so not really sure.
To be fair, I kinda like that ‘bug’, if so.
well i hate that design because i use my fenix 5X to track all activities and track VO2 max and so on because edge and fenix doesnt sync with eachother,so if i cannot discard the activity on my edge and it force uploads then i get 2 different activities in connect and all ather platforms linked to connect as well as a 2 different vo2 max values..
i love the edge 1030 but because of that stupid designed save only feature i allmost tend to leave the freakin thing at home
on all other devices you can allways select if you want to save or discard
It was reported back within the Garmin Forums that this is functioning by design (I’m not sure if the individual worked for Garmin or not). Unfortunately I don’t think it’s going to change. I’ve set Strava to ‘not public’ by default because of this and manually delete / mark public activities as needed.
I can confirm this is by design. The implementation was done to prevent users from accidentally deleting rides. I have passed on customers experience with the design and continue to report feedback to the Edge team.
might very well make me sell my edge 1030 and get something else :( one thing is they dont make their devices sync with eachother but they sure cant tell me that i am not allowed to delete/discard an activity
i want to have the choice myself
Shawn that is probably the most stupid decision garmin has made !!
if it was really needed then they should have just made two settings one with the discard/save setting and one without the discard setting
Totally disagree! Nice upgrade to me, so I won’t delete my ride accidentally when coming home and shutting down the device.
Why should you delete your ride after riding for over 13 km!?!? If so, you will be able to delete it afterwards in Garmin Connect and/or Strava. So don’t see the problem with this.
Which other device maker made their devices sync? As far as I know no one.
However it should be very handy indeed. But to sell my Garmin Edge for that reason?
Also of note is that VO2Max actually doesn’t sync across devices at this point. It can upload to Garmin Connect, but isn’t (yet) back-synced to other devices.
This is something I note since every new device I get I go through a few weeks of the VO2Max slowly rising.
Simply deleting the duplicate activity afterwards would remove the secondary VO2Max value. Note, as someone who records almost every ride on 2-3 Garmin devices for power meter comparison testing…it’s something I’m really familiar with. ;)
For sure a show stopper – Thanks to Frank Andreasen for making me aware.
I was told a couple weeks ago the plan was early April for this integration to occur. I’ll check later this week and see if that’s the case.
Hello Ray. Huge fan of your work. Have been using Garmin edge product for a long time. and most recently upgraded to the 1030. Very happy with the unit and its features. No problems at all. Using full sensors and communication options etc. Only concern has been my Edge remote, which presents the issues mentioned in the garmin forum page:
link to forums.garmin.com
garmin did respond back on mid Nov 17 but it has not been addressed yet in the most recent update 3.7.
Do you have an inside scoop on this issues being resolve in an upcoming update? Need my remote in our Nova Scotian winters.
Thx
I don’t know if this will work for you, but you might try pairing it by using different combinations of 2 of the 3 remote buttons to enter pairing mode. Mine seemed to have some issues and I tried different buttons for pairing until it worked (I think it was the two non-programmable buttons). The remote did show different IDs upon pairing this way.
This might not have had anything to do with it at all, but would be worth testing since mine has magically stayed connected afterward.
I also have the remote and it works fine with the 1030……..
wow OMG, somebody butchered that battery pack design…If you have few bikes you need to change the mounts…How about designing the pack so it seats in the mount and then you twist Garmin 1030 in to the battery pack, it would be compatible with all the mounts. I think I’m gonna design and print that on my 3D printer.
Wouldn’t someone with multiple bikes simply get multiple mounts?
Someone knows when the battery pack will be available? In The Netherlands they now say it will be available somewhere mid February……..
My Power Pack is supposed to arrive at my bike shop later today. I’m in Southern California. I ordered the battery pack at the same time as my Edge 1030, which I received on September 30.
Garmin has been saying that since the Power Pack contains a lithium ion battery, they cannot be shipped by air, so delivery times have slipped. (One wonders how big a surprise this could have been, and why the same doesn’t apply to the computers as well, since their battery is supposedly the same size as the Power Pack.)
The Garmin web site says the delivery time of the Power Pack is still 3 – 5 weeks as of this morning.
BikeTiresDirect also has the Charge Pack in stock. I ordered one yesterday. I was told earlier this month by my dealer they wouldn’t have them until February, but apparently they shipped and will now have it today.
I agree with @sebo that the mounting design is flawed and shortsighted. The charge pack should go between the 1030 and the mount. I use Barfly Garmin mounts with GoPro attachments below for lights (like the UT800, etc). Now I have to choose between using a battery or a light, or adding a second mount for the light (Ugh!).
They didn’t even have the foresight to think it thru for this of us who have their own UT800 light. You can use one or the other but not both. Doh!
But think about it. Garmin lights don’t have anything like the burn time they’d need if you were doing a 24 hour or longer ride. You would most likely want a different lighting solution for a ride where the Power Pack would keep your Edge going without interruption.
I also own the UT800 and two tail lights. Maybe I’ll try the headlight with a Jackery Mini feeding it, and see how long the head light lasts.
I have other lights too, including one that mounts to the rear of the UT800 body and feeds a cable into a half-frame bag for connection to a battery pack. The real point is I want to retain my GoPro mounting solution and not have to reconfigure my bike(s) when I decide to carry the charge pack.
I know this was posted 4 months ago but I have a question about the bluetooth smart on the unit. Did you test a power meter through bluetooth and how did it work? I paired my P1 pedals and it no longer shows torque effectiveness or pedal smoothness post ride. I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong. Info would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Bram-
That’s because Torque Effectiveness and Pedal Smoothness are ANT+ metrics, not BLE metrics. BLE doesn’t have a exact mirror of those metrics at this point that companies have adopted.
In general, unless something is broken you should pretty much always pair power meters specifically via ANT+ rather than Bluetooth Smart. At least for another year or two, until companies get a bit more standardized on stuff.
Cheers.
Do you know if it’s possible to get an alternative route if using “navigate back to start”, if there’s a roadblock or flood in the way of your route?
Thanks for these great reviews. I recently added a powertap to my road bike, and more recently upgraded to a G3. I’m still rocking my 705 and it still does great. But with the new hub and me using strava more. How much better is the 810/820/1000/1030 world than my works great 705? I like the idea that the new stuff will pay attention to segment starts/stops and the whole crash alert thing is cool. But in terms of tracking my PT metrics, does it matter?
In terms of your PT hub metrics, honestly, no, there’s zero difference there.
It’ll do stuff like calculate power zones and FTP better, as well as some training load aspects. And it’ll actually integrate with Strava (for Live Segments, as well as downloading routes from Strava to the unit directly). But if neither of those matter, then… buy a lot of ice cream instead?
Good news, Garmin released the new firmware 3.8 to fix incorrect temperature and many other issue.
The beta claimed to fix serious problems with the Garmin Remote essentially not working at all. It didn’t fix it. The temperature problem did get fixed.
I’m doing a first ride with 3.80 tomorrow. I hope it fixes the Remote problem, but I’m not all that hopeful, given they haven’t been able to make it very stable on the 1000 either in the years since it came out.
Now that Karoo v1.0 is a bust I’m back looking at alternatives.
Having read through all the posts here along with the Garmin forum and some scathing reviews elsewhere it is apparent there is a honeymoon phase with the 1030 followed by levels of disenchantment. Too many users have reported too many problems. That is ridiculous in a flagship product. While some issues are addressed in recent firmware updates (6 months later), I can’t see spending $600 for a flawed GPS. Perhaps Karoo 2 with mature software in 2019 or a future Garmin product will finally get things right. Until then it looks like the Wahoo BOLT offers the most bang for the buck with the least problems.
Every Garmin cycle computer has an extended teething period for its software. Not 6 months…longer! A future Garmin product will not get it right; rather, that will be more of a rinse and repeat scenario. After a while expect that the 1030 will more-or-less get it right…mostly (and expect old bugs to get reintroduced here and there). That is the nature of the Garmin universe. As a software engineer, I question their QA process (and wonder sometimes whether they even have a QA process).
I once had a Garmin Nuvi for my car that wouldn’t hold a charge for more than about 20 mins (out of 5 hrs claimed). Garmin customer support told me that’s because I had GPS turned on. Seriously. LOL
people come on the forums to complain not to praise.
i have the 1030 edge and it’s a great unit.
it’s been solid. works with di2, edge remote, power meters from my pedals (Powertap) and my trainer.
@Gabe “people come on the forums to complain not to praise.”
That’s not a bad thing? I think it’s great that people have a place to voice their criticisms and complaints, when the device they paid $600 for doesn’t work as advertised. I applaud Garmin for standing up a forum where such complaints can be made, and that they solicit and monitor that feedback.
I bought new a 810, 820, 1000 and 1030, as well as ANT+ accessories for each. Not one of the Edge worked out of the box as advertised, and Garmin needed some time to stabilize the software.