Will you Karoo? Hammerhead makes a strong case for device migration
(PHOTO CREDIT: ABOVE) The Karoo is South Africa’s ‘soul space.’ A part of the country that attracts eccentrics, hippies, crafters and outsiders. (Thank you, Guardian travel ). Searchers of empty space and deserted gravel roads. And it’s from this dry, arid part of the continent that cycling’s most user-friendly head-unit borrows its name. So will it be your next bike device?
For Garmin and other cycling computers, Karoo’s migration from startup to competitor has been hard to miss. It’s used in more than 100 countries and has built a user community in unofficial support groups, with their blog content and through in-app Strava marketing. Never have I rode with such a chatter-inducing piece of tech. Fans include ex-pro George Hincapie; a Velonews profile of Bobby Julich’s Pinarello Grevil has the stealthy black square perched and ride-ready.
If you’ve eyed its features, you’re not alone. It is simple and intuitive to use (though I still struggle with a couple key features) and always improving (recent upgrades included support for e-drivetrains Di2, Sram, Campy EPS and Garmin’s Varia). Weighed against the feature-sets deemed essential by most (by HNH, anyway) - weight, nav and battery life - it is the market leader in many respects. Let’s look at it against those features and the device many will liken it to, the Garmin 1030.
The weighting is the hardest part - Somewhere in a New York City boardroom, a group of Hammerhead product managers and designers are scrutinizing Karoo’s hardware. It is noticeably large. As one curious onlooker remarked during a recent club ride, it’s downright beefy.
To be exact, the Karoo weighs 54 percent more than the Garmin 1030. In future iterations, it’s easy to imagine buttons cut (5 in the Karoo versus 3 in the 1030) and more reliance placed on the device’s phone-like touch screen. Once clicked in, rest assured, the weight is unnoticeable. Steering clear of a device for weight-weenie rage-inducing 68 grams is ridiculous.
The Hammerhead device is definitely beefy: 192 grams compared to 124 grams for the Garmin 1030.
Another item to note: though the company’s site says “the Karoo is compatible with any quarter-turn compatible Garmin mount,” it wasn’t with mine. If fit, but it was crazy tight. I was concerned about cracking the backplate so I only used the Hammerhead-issued mount.**
Navigation - Where Hammerhead has made the most compelling case for user adoption is with its navigation capabilities. Uploading or creating routes on the 1030 is painful by comparison; you have to download GPX or equivalent files, then navigate Garmin’s complicated file system to populate, sometimes requiring multiple attempts. The in-ride experience is also lesser then; following the triangle along the route isn’t hard, but it isn’t obvious or good, either. Garmin will surely remedy this; mapping is very static and out of step with other touch screen experiences.
Using the Karoo is markedly different. I often pull people’s routes from Strava when planning for trips or exploring nearby roads. Karoo has nailed this user-experience:
Log-in to your Karoo profile online.
Download the GPX file from Strava.
Drag and drop the file onto your Karoo profile page, route builder section on your laptop.
It auto-populates on your device.
Dead-simple. Route planning anywhere in the world will never be the same. The turn-by-turn instructions are easy to spot on the large colour screen and you can still view in-ride vitals (power, HR, etc…). One routing function I’ve not yet mastered is creating in-ride directions, though I now know this involves a long hold while stopped, dropping a pin in the desired location and routing directions auto-populate - something I’ll have to try again next time I need alternate routing options home.
The juice is loose - One of the options I’ve come to love most on the Garmin 1030 is the “auto-off,” which effectively leaves you with a blank screen while riding but still capturing data. This prolongs battery life to more than the stated 15 hours. The stated battery life of the Karoo is also 15 hours; you can play with the brightness and manually put the device to sleep, but the same auto-off function isn’t available. That said, the device keeps plenty of charge. One percent lasted for 10 kilometers on a recent ride where I came in on fumes. The battery life held fine (deep sigh of cold-sweat inducing relief).
Charge times from zero are also quicker with Karoo; getting to 100% took about 2.5 hours versus a 70% charge for the 1030 over the same time period. I’d have to say the devices are pretty even here; if you’re really after long battery life, the Garmin might even have the edge with the above mentioned auto-off capability. I rarely spend more than 4 hours consistently in the saddle however, so for my purposes, either device offers more than enough.
Migrating from the Garmin Ecosystem - Why isn’t the navigation better on other computers? Why are route uploads sometimes difficult? Because Hammerhead as modelled Karoo’s UI like a phone - now familiar and ubiquitous ecosystems for all - you can’t help but ask yourself these and other questions when starting to toy around and ride with it.
Yes it takes a little use to get familiar with the hardware, but any pain points are short lived. DC Rainmaker goes deep on device’s functionality more than I care to and here is a side-by-side comparison of both device’s functionality - but again, against features I think average athletes care about most, Karoo makes a compelling case.
I love the Garmin 1030 and most of the company’s power and GPS devices; they do have user challenges, however, which Hammerhead has addressed. I suspect, given their size differences, one makes a good acquisition target for the other, swallowing up a better UX into slightly better hardware. But that’s pure speculation. For now, Karoo will continue to evolve, as it has since its initial release, and the users who’ve grown to prefer it’s Android-powered OS, will continue to extol its virtues relative to the devices that have long-dominated cycling.
The competition is good. In the Karoo, it has given birth to a very slick, very capable, very user-friendly alternative many should strongly consider.
**I’ve since chatted about this with Hammerhead. They maintain that the “standard quarter-turn mount interface works with aftermarket brackets.”