I’d love to believe that Garmin’s Edge 305 is a great piece of equipment, but unfortunately my experiences with the device — two so far — have left me unconvinced.
From day one it has been subject to battery draining hangs if you don’t switch it off and disconnect it from the PC in precisely the right order, and even then sometimes it’ll just hang. You get into the habit of switching off, unplugging, then switching it back on briefly just to check. A number of firmware updates haven’t cured the problem, perhaps lessening the frequency though. Its the only USB device I’ve ever heard of that has this problem.
Another design flaw seems to be a loose mounting bracket and a mount almost at one end — it always seemed wobbly and eventually my first one when I hit a bump and smashed the display. Just under ten months life for that one.
Four weeks later I received a replacement, still subject to the software hangs.
Nearly ten months into the life of the second unit, in early December 2007, and I noticed that one of the buttons didn’t work anymore, but I don’t tend to use the up/down arrows so I’ve no idea how long that was the case, then a few weeks later it started to randomly turn itself off if I hit a bump in the road. I resisted sending it back to GME until after the Alpine Classic in late January, then today posted it off for repair or replacement.
Now the wait, hopefully not another four weeks, until I get it back. A dodgy product or just bad luck and two bad items?
Updated: Ah damn, I guess I should have read all the data off it before I shipped it off, I think it unlikely that they’ll send it back with the memory still full, especially if it gets replaced. Oh no, I’ve lost all records of my commutes since Feb. 8!
