not WAHOO Element Roam
The Roam go anywhere, until you need to charge, then you can’t
The roam by Wahoo, coined as the go anywhere bike packing GPS computer. That was the gist of their marketing campaign, at least. I bought this because I managed to break my old Garmin Edge 1000. So being in the market, I asked twitter (First mistake) the road seemed to be loved by everyone on there, so did the YouTube reviews. Everyone seemed to be raving about how good it was. And well, so I went with it.
When I got my hands on it, it seemed alright nothing to complain about really it was fairly easy to set up, but I instantly found something missing, being able to set up profiles for different bikes etc. Not the biggest thing, and I’m sure I could have lived with it. But when actually trying to live with this roam, bike packing with it especially, I'm starting wondering what everyone was raving about. I’m sure just riding long day rides it is probably OK but remember Wahoo marketed this thing as the perfect bike packing GPS computer.
The first thing to note is it’s incredibly reliant on your phone, want to look at the route you are following, maybe look a little ahead, to find out what’s coming up, well you will have to just use your phone because all you can do on the wahoo screen is zoom in or out zooming does show you more of the route but removes the map so doesnt really help. If I wanted to use my phone to look at the map, I would just get a quad lock.
People say this isn’t a big deal and doesn’t affect most people and I would agree if it was just marketed as a general GPS unit for racing or what not, but it wasn’t it was marketed as a go anywhere GPS and you know what you might need to do when you go anywhere, plug it into power, it does have a pretty decent battery but even so at some point i might need to charge it while riding and guess what, you cannot plug this into a power bank while riding with it in the out front mount.
My issues continued from not being able to get routes from my phone to the wahoo because it wouldn’t connect, I never could get this roam to connect to the Wi-Fi. In the end, I just had to give up with this device. Wahoo and their non-existent customer service left a sour taste in my mouth and I ended up going back to Garmin and picked up a Garmin 830 which is much closer to an actual go anywhere GPS unit.
