Lezyne Mega XL GPS vs Wahoo Elemnt Bolt
EDIT HISTORY: This post was initially published in February 2019, and updated in the summer when some firmware updates landed. Those firmware updates fixed a number of problems, but not all of them. It was updated again in October 2019 to try out the new firmware, which caused many of the old problems to resurface, effectively ruining the device.
I've owned the Wahoo Elemnt Bolt for a while, and I like it. It has poor in-app route creation, and the battery life could be better. (see my whole review here)
The Lezyne Mega XL GPS came out recently and seems like a better fit for bikepacking. Lezyne advertises a 48 hour battery life and much improved offline navigation and maps. It's also $50 cheaper. If the Lezyne delivers on it's promise, then it would be a compelling choice. I got it to test out and see how it works in real life scenarios.
might be worth the major problems is trash and unfortunately not worth using. The recent firmware updates have reverted the unit to being unable to load routes from the phone, which renders it completely useless. If they fix any of these issues in a future firmware update, beware, as they may break them again in future releases.
The Lezyne is less convenient -- there's a phone app, but to update the firmware, you need to use a Mac/Windows program (this is a problem for nerds like me who only run Linux at home). The Lezyne has more stuff in the menus, so it's a bit harder to navigate at first and figure out how to sync. Fortunately, you can use the phone app to customize almost every aspect of the device.
You can also customize it based on the bike and select a bike profile. This is a really neat way to show different information based on the bike, and it'll keep track of how much mileage you've done on a per-bike basis.
The Lezyne uses metric units throughout by default. There are a few places you can change to use English units (miles, Farenheit degrees, etc), but I had to put in my weight as kilograms and height as centimeters. The Wahoo has an English/Metric setting which controls almost everything.
Syncing sensors was straightforward -- open the menu, go to Sensors, do the sync, and it's done. It's quite easy on both devices.
Syncing with Strava is easy on both devices. You actually log in with the GPS Root website, and then the app syncs to Strava automatically. You have to enable automatic sync for the Lezyne, and if *anything* goes weird with the route, you'll have to sync manually. If the Lezyne isn't connected to the phone when the ride ends, then you must manually sync. The Wahoo will automatically sync your rides whenever it connects to the GPS again.
The Lezyne app has fairly bad UX. When editing settings, you have to click the setting, click it to On (or Off), confirm, then hit a tiny "SAVE" icon in the top right to actually save your settings. If you're an idiot, like me, then you'll forget to hit "SAVE" and wonder why the app isn't working right. The app is fairly slow to save settings and open them up. Doing anything in the app requires 2-3 more clicks or taps than it feels like it should.
The Lezyne boots much faster than the Wahoo. The Wahoo takes about 30 seconds to boot, while the Lezyne takes 4 seconds. This is a plus for the Lezyne.
The Wahoo's automatic shutdown gives you a 15 second warning with a beep before it turns off. The Lezyne beeps and shuts off immediately.
The Elemnt wins this section. The app works great and is very easy to use. The Lezyne is much more complicated, and it's harder to get started with.
The middle action button is used for starting, pausing, and resuming the ride. The right button is used for going to the next page (there is no way to go "back" a page). The left button's function changes in a few contexts:
The power button takes you to a "settings" menu, where you can adjust the backlight, LEDs, select a planned workout, add sensors, etc.
The up/down buttons are used to scroll through menus, or zoom pages in/out. Zooming an info page in shows less information in a larger font. Zooming out shows more information in a smaller font. I almost always have the most information available at once.
Zooming with the altitude and map allows you to change the scale of the map or altitude projection. The map includes a scaling indicator so you can know how much zoom you actually have. The altitude projection has no scaling indicator, and the zoom levels aren't very satisfying.
The Lezyne has four buttons. Two are on the left side of the device, and two are on the right side of the device. The buttons are symmetrical, and I've occasionally pressed the wrong button while trying to grip the unit with enough pressure to do what I want.
The unit has two "modes" of operation -- ordinary riding and menu-mode.
In ordinary mode, the top two buttons are used to go back and forth through the pages. The bottom right button is used to start a ride or start a lap. The bottom left button is used to control the backlight.
The top left button doubles as a "power" button -- hold-pressing it once puts you in a menu to switch bikes or shut it off, and hold-pressing it a second time shuts the device off. The top right button, when held down, takes you into the device menu where you can adjust all the settings. During a ride, the bottom left button's long-press function is to pause the ride, which brings up a menu to resume, save, discard, or go to the main menu.
In Menu mode, the two buttons on the right act as up/down, the top-left is 'Back', and the bottom-left is 'Enter/Confirm/OK/Select'.
The Lezyne has way more customizability and control in the device itself, and the controls are more complicated to account for this. The Elemnt puts more of the customization into the phone app, which allows them to streamline much of the device's functionality. The Elemnt has more controls, and each of the controls are more specialized -- it's very easy to do common tasks like start/stop/pause, check cue sheet, etc.
Overall, the Elemnt wins, though if you strongly prefer to edit device settings without needing to have a phone on, then the Lezyne is more capable.
The Lezyne doesn't come with any maps downloaded, at all. I suppose this saves on disk space. To sync a map to the device, you:
Evidently, the map data generated from the website does not enable offline routing, but it enables some actual map display on the device. I'm not entirely sure what's going on with this, to be honest, as I lost all map display on a ride recently. I've opened a support request with Lezyne, and will update when I hear back. (UPDATE October 19 2019: I have not heard back.)
The mobile app can also be used to generate maps and download to the device, but it takes *forever* to do this. The Lezyne uses BlueTooth Low Energy, which is extremely slow. The maps generated by the mobile app do seem to allow offline routing, but they require much more space on the device.
Where the map of a huge chunk of the front range was 9MB, the mobile app errors with "Map Section Too Large" until I narrowed it down to about half of the Denver metro area, which resulted in a 71MB map file. The app then attempted to send this file to the Lezyne for about 30 minutes. It finally fails with a generic "We have no idea what went wrong" error message. There was nowhere near enough space on the device, and it would have been easy to check that beforehand without wasting half an hour.
There's no way to "free" a downloaded map from the Lezyne from the phone app or device itself, so it seems like you'll just fill the device up if you don't have access to a computer. The offline routing is just too limited to be useful with the space limitations on the device. Speaking of space limitations, I wonder what happens if it runs out of space during a ride - will it just silently fail to record it?
If the Lezyne delivered on it's promise, it should easily win here. It does not. The sketchy software and limited space for offline routing renders the feature nearly useless.
The Lezyne is a bit different. You have to upload a GPX or TCX file to their GPS Root website. Then you manually sync it to your phone. Then you can send that to the device. You technically could use the GPS Root website to create a route, but it's remarkably awful -- either Strava or RideWithGPS would be better. TCX exports from RideWithGPS have turn-by-turn directions, so this is probably the best way to go.
There's a promising "Strava Routes" link on the website, but it says "Coming Soon" with no estimated time or announcement or anything useful. This is annoying. There hasn't been an update on the site since middle of last year, so who knows when it'll actually get implemented. (UPDATE October 19 2019: They have removed the 'Strava Routes' lmao).
The Elemnt wins this one. It has one fewer step, and it syncs automatically with Strava and RideWithGPS. The Lezyne requires a few additional steps, but is ultimately just as capable as the Wahoo.
The Elemnt has some issues with routes -- if you go off-route, it just beeps at you and flashes red on the LEDs. This throws off the topo map and the cue sheet, which makes it somewhat difficult to get back on route. It only draws a mile or two beyond your current location, so if you need to reroute or detour part of the route then it can be difficult to figure out how to get back on the route. The Bolt could dramatically improve this by drawing the entire route on the map, making it easier to get back on track. UPDATE 2019-10-19: The Bolt was updated recently to draw the entire route! This has made getting back on track and rerouting dramatically better.
The Lezyne draws the entire route on the map. This is extremely nice for getting back on track after a detour.
The Wahoo is fairly sensitive to going off-route. If the trail was recently redeveloped and moved several feet to the right/left, then it'll think you've gone off route, and start whining at you. Since Wahoo doesn't draw the trace unless you're on the route, this can leave you without navigation until you convince the Bolt that you're where you need to be.
Selecting a route on the Lezyne is a bit more convoluted. You click the menu icon in the top left of the screen, tap "Navigate", tap the three dots in the top *right* of the screen, click "Saved Routes", click the route you want, and finally click "GO" in the bottom right of the screen. You have to have synced a route previously to the GPS Root website for it to appear here. There is no option to select a saved route from the GPS device directly; you must have the device connected to the phone.
If the route is long, then expect it to take a very long time to sync, if it ever does. I waited for nearly 20 minutes for the Lezyne app to sync a 100km race route, and it never successfully did it. I tried to sync a 102 mile route to the Lezyne GPS and it never worked. This is a pretty serious problem for the device to have. On further testing, it would appear that the maximum route it can reliably sync is about 60 miles. Anything longer than that is sketchy, and I have not successfully sent a route of 70 miles or more to the device at all.
Fortunately, the above issue has been resolved in a firmware update. I was able to successfully send a 400+ mile route from Denver to Santa Fe in a matter of seconds. UPDATE 2019-10-19: Unfortunately, the problem appears to be back! I'm unable to sync an 82km route. The application is spinning on a "Please Wait" screen and is totally unresponsive to any input. This was after waiting about 10 minutes to sync a 110 mile route that failed to sync every time.
One nice thing that the Lezyne has over the Elemnt is that it can direct you to the start of a route using the on-the-fly routing, which I will cover in the next section. This is an excellent feature.
The Elemnt has a single routing screen, and you can toggle between a map view and a cue-sheet view. The cue-sheet view has an option to "Reverse route" which just tells you to do everything in reverse. This can be useful if you have a one-way route and want to turn it into an out-and-back. When you are riding, you can also select "Trace back to start," and it'll reverse your route to get you where you started. It also tells you how many miles are left in the route, and you can scroll through the entire cue sheet.
The Lezyne has three routing screens.
You can adjust zoom on the maps by holding the lower-left button. There's no "scale" so you have no idea how zoomed in you actually are. (UPDATE 2019-10-19: They have put a scale on the map!) There are four three zoom levels, and all are pretty close - the largest is 1.3mi, then 0.6mi, then 843 ft. This is good for tight trails, but it can be annoying when you're trying to get a clearer picture of where you are.
A recent update has allowed up to two customizable data screens for the Lezyne. This is nice, but they take up a huge amount of valuable map
The Lezyne also offers "Trace back to start," but it hasn't ever worked for me. The device just kinda sits there, ignoring the phone. Fortunately you can just follow your old line in the map view, but it's nice to get alerts that there's a turn coming up.
I'm calling this one a tie. The Elemnt Bolt is fantastic for a route until you go off-route, at which point it . The Lezyne's lack of complete cue sheet and weird interface are problems, but if you need to go off-route, then the GPS gets way less confused. UPDATE 2019-10-19: The Wahoo wins this one now, by a decent amount. The Lezyne is back to it's old bullshit with failing to load routes, and the Wahoo now displays the entire route on the map, so getting back on-route is good.
If you've got the Elemnt Bolt, you're kind of hosed. The Bolt app allows you to click a point on a map, search for landmarks or addresses, and get turn-by-turn directions directly to that point. There is no option to change the route, and you only get one choice. The Bolt's routing seems to favor highways and other nasty roads, and there's no way to get it to favor a backroad setup. I've also had it route me down roads that were closed or impassible, which is a pretty huge issue.
Wahoo claims that they get everything from Google, but they clearly don't. I've compared the Wahoo app's route to Google Maps directions, and Google Maps consistently gives multiple better options. The Wahoo route is not even represented on the Google Maps search.Finally, the Wahoo "search" function seemingly has no concept of "filter by my current location," and is thrilled to try and route you somewhere that's 1,000 miles away. (UPDATE 2019-10-19: This is entirely fixed, and dramatically better now).
The workarounds are a bit clumsy. For the first issue, the best thing to do is click a point on the map that takes you on the waypoint you want. When you arrive there, enter a new route. Repeat until you've done what you want. Yuck. It's exceedingly difficult to get it to select bike paths, so I usually just use Google Maps on my phone for navigation - the audio gets piped into my Trekz headphones, which works well enough for me.
This is a big negative aspect to the Wahoo, and this is where the Lezyne really (finally) shines. The Lezyne phone app is a dream to use for navigation. Much like Strava or RideWithGPS, you get a map view. You tap a waypoint, and it suggests a few options to get there. You select one (or accept the default), and click another waypoint. You repeat until the route looks like you want it, then you send it the device. It's not quite as nice as RideWithGPS, but it's easily the best mobile route creation I've seen. Why isn't the rest of their software this good?
The Lezyne is the clear winner. The Elemnt just isn't even trying. If the device had more storage for offline maps and routing, then the Lezyne would really be onto something with this for adventuring. Its really unfortunate that it is plagued with so many other problems - it feels like a 1000HP engine that's been slapped on a bicycle. Sure, one part is truly amazing, but you can't actually use it because the rest of the device is totally incapable of taking advantage of it.
If you don't hit it, and start moving, it'll beep and flash and ask if you want to start recording -- I've used this a few times, as I occasionally forget to start recording. When I come to a stop, the "auto-pause" screen pops up, and there's an option to end the ride and save it.
After I've saved it, it'll sync through the Elemnt app over Bluetooth, and in a few seconds, it'll be uploaded to Strava (and RideWithGPS). The Bolt assumes that if you've logged in to a website through the app that you want to sync to it -- reasonable. If it's a 100 mile ride or something, it might take 15-30 seconds for the entire process to complete.
You can turn off the device mid-ride, and it'll save the current ride. When you turn it back on, it asks if you want to resume it. This even works if the ride was interrupted due to the battery running out.
The Lezyne is much worse. You have to manually enable all of the syncing stuff by digging into all the various menus. There's a FAQ entry with a number of steps to perform this process.
On my first test ride, I went through the FAQ and had everything setup. The Lezyne GPS had my Strava starred segments loaded, so I figured it'd be fine to sync rides.
The bottom right button starts the ride. To stop the ride, you hold the "Start/Lap" button, click it again (as a down button) to select "Save" on the menu, and finally hit the "Enter" button.
For the first test ride, I waited 45 minutes for it to sync to Strava. It did not sync the ride to my phone until I manually synced it. When I manually synced the ride, it did upload to the Lezyne Root website. It did not copy the "personal note" item, which seems like a bug.
I redid all my sync stuff, and did a quick walk around my apartment to get another ride tested. This one synced immediately and worked fine. Hopefully the first attempt was a first time glitch, and I won't see it again. In either case, I'm unimpressed with how clunky that was.
After several more rides with the Lezyne, it "mostly" works. If there is any kind of hiccup with the BlueTooth connection at any point during the ride, then the whole ride fails to upload, and you will need to manually sync. If you attempt to use navigation, then you will need to manually upload. It's fairly flaky.
It does not save rides if you turn off the device mid-ride. It loses them - forever!
The Elemnt wins this one. It's a nicer device that's easier to use and has fewer bugs and failure possibilities.
It's enough for a long day's riding, but you need to charge it every night. I wanted something I could charge less frequently, and thus I bought the Lezyne.
The Lezyne is similar, in that every feature you use reduces the battery life. One thing the Lezyne does that is clever is "Adaptive Recording." Basically, the device doesn't track points if it can get away with it -- if you're moving at a mostly constant speed in a straight line, it'll record points up to 12 seconds apart. This can result in some weird tracking information. I disabled it during a fatbike ride, as it was not registering movement, and turning it off caused it to detect the ride appropriately.
For a bikepacking ride, where you don't really need the most accurate tracking, then this is a fine trade off. But for everyday riding, the loss in precision can make it annoying.
Another good feature for extending battery life is a brightness control on the backlight. You can adjust it in 5% intervals, and 25% is plenty to see at night. This must save a lot of power, though I am not sure exactly how to test that.
I haven't tested the battery life as thoroughly as the Elemnt, so my experiences are more limited here. I did a day ride with about 6 hours of riding total. The Lezyne started with a full charge. I had the backlight running at 25%, navigation (for the last five hours...), Adaptive Recording off, and two sensors connected. It was cold out; temperatures ranged from 11-39 degrees Fahrenheit. At the end of the ride, the Lezyne complained that it was on low battery. Six hours! That's less than the Elemnt with comparable usage, though the Elemnt hasn't been tested with this temperature before, and the low temps certainly contributed to poor battery life. I also don't know how much longer it'll last on low battery than the Bolt - the Bolt has a pretty linear power curve, so the difference from 100% to 90% takes about as long as the time from 10% to 0%.
I did another test at home, with the device sitting on my couch. Auto-pause was turned off, adaptive recording was off, and it had a 25% backlight. It ran the battery down to "empty" in about 5 hours, but it kept trucking for another 6 hours before I went to bed. In those six hours, it wouldn't connect to my phone, so it must disable Bluetooth with low battery. This is a totally artificial test, as it might have other clever tricks to prevent recording identical GPS points.
Per the Lezyne support forum, if the battery dies while you're on a long ride, the you lose the entire ride! The Wahoo will save your current ride and suspend it, so you can recover the ride after you get to a charge. This is a massive failing. Unfortunately, for this reason, I can't tell you exactly how long it limped along in lower power mode - but it can get at least 11 hours.
The Lezyne wins this one. It doesn't win by as much as the 48 hour claim would suggest, but it's good. I'd like to test it on a bikepacking trip, but it is currently February in Denver, and I'm evidently not brave enough for winter camping just yet.
I've opened a ticket with Lezyne for the offline maps issue I noted above, and I'm not particularly impressed. I opened the ticket, provided a link to relevant files, and it took nine days to receive a response. The response asked for screenshots from my phone to show me downloading the maps, so I tried to create a shot-by-shot depiction. Ironically, their process started bugging out, and would spend 15 minutes generating a map square that would end up being 0KB (eg a failure). I tried three times (wasting about 45 minutes) to download a map square, picking progressively smaller and smaller rectangles. I gave up at this point.
Lezyne just released a new firmware update that contains references to two of the problems I've been having. I have no idea if my support tickets are driving these updates, but if they are, that would be pretty amazing. Unfortunately, they're not actually fixing the problems with the device, so it's too bad.
I'll probably end up selling my Lezyne. The Wahoo's problems are relatively easy to work around - Google Maps and GaiaGPS app can do offline routing now, and you probably are bringing a battery pack anyway for bikepacking. The Lezyne's problems are more serious, and it is less pleasant to use for the usual riding.
UPDATE 2019-10-19: I thought I'd give the Lezyne another chance with the most recent firmware. Looks like it's regressed back to it's previous shitty state as a mostly unusable GPS device. What's the point of a huge battery and offline routing if you can't load routes or store maps?
I've owned the Wahoo Elemnt Bolt for a while, and I like it. It has poor in-app route creation, and the battery life could be better. (see my whole review here)
The Lezyne Mega XL GPS came out recently and seems like a better fit for bikepacking. Lezyne advertises a 48 hour battery life and much improved offline navigation and maps. It's also $50 cheaper. If the Lezyne delivers on it's promise, then it would be a compelling choice. I got it to test out and see how it works in real life scenarios.
 |
| Side by side comparison |
tl;dr:
- The Lezyne has dramatically better route creation from the phone app.
- The Lezyne has better battery life, with serious caveats.
- The software on the Wahoo is vastly better.
- The Wahoo is nicer in almost every single way.
- The Lezyne has a number of serious showstopper bugs and software reliability issues.
Initial Setup
With the Wahoo Elemnt Bolt, you download an app on your phone. The Bolt displays a QR code, which the app uses to sync the device. The phone app can update the firmware on the Bolt over Bluetooth or Wifi. It's super convenient.The Lezyne is less convenient -- there's a phone app, but to update the firmware, you need to use a Mac/Windows program (this is a problem for nerds like me who only run Linux at home). The Lezyne has more stuff in the menus, so it's a bit harder to navigate at first and figure out how to sync. Fortunately, you can use the phone app to customize almost every aspect of the device.
You can also customize it based on the bike and select a bike profile. This is a really neat way to show different information based on the bike, and it'll keep track of how much mileage you've done on a per-bike basis.
The Lezyne uses metric units throughout by default. There are a few places you can change to use English units (miles, Farenheit degrees, etc), but I had to put in my weight as kilograms and height as centimeters. The Wahoo has an English/Metric setting which controls almost everything.
Syncing sensors was straightforward -- open the menu, go to Sensors, do the sync, and it's done. It's quite easy on both devices.
Syncing with Strava is easy on both devices. You actually log in with the GPS Root website, and then the app syncs to Strava automatically. You have to enable automatic sync for the Lezyne, and if *anything* goes weird with the route, you'll have to sync manually. If the Lezyne isn't connected to the phone when the ride ends, then you must manually sync. The Wahoo will automatically sync your rides whenever it connects to the GPS again.
The Lezyne app has fairly bad UX. When editing settings, you have to click the setting, click it to On (or Off), confirm, then hit a tiny "SAVE" icon in the top right to actually save your settings. If you're an idiot, like me, then you'll forget to hit "SAVE" and wonder why the app isn't working right. The app is fairly slow to save settings and open them up. Doing anything in the app requires 2-3 more clicks or taps than it feels like it should.
The Lezyne boots much faster than the Wahoo. The Wahoo takes about 30 seconds to boot, while the Lezyne takes 4 seconds. This is a plus for the Lezyne.
The Wahoo's automatic shutdown gives you a 15 second warning with a beep before it turns off. The Lezyne beeps and shuts off immediately.
The Elemnt wins this section. The app works great and is very easy to use. The Lezyne is much more complicated, and it's harder to get started with.
Controls
The Wahoo Elemnt Bolt has a power button on the left side, a pair of up/down buttons on the right side, and three "action" buttons on the face of the device. |
| Wahoo front view, three buttons and LEDs |
- During a ride, you can press this button to start a new lap.
- While the ride is paused, you can press this button to stop the ride.
- On the route page, you can use this button to toggle between the map view and cue sheet.
 |
| Wahoo left-side power button |
 |
| Wahoo side buttons |
Zooming with the altitude and map allows you to change the scale of the map or altitude projection. The map includes a scaling indicator so you can know how much zoom you actually have. The altitude projection has no scaling indicator, and the zoom levels aren't very satisfying.
 |
| Lezyne left side buttons |
The unit has two "modes" of operation -- ordinary riding and menu-mode.
 |
| Lezyne right side buttons |
The top left button doubles as a "power" button -- hold-pressing it once puts you in a menu to switch bikes or shut it off, and hold-pressing it a second time shuts the device off. The top right button, when held down, takes you into the device menu where you can adjust all the settings. During a ride, the bottom left button's long-press function is to pause the ride, which brings up a menu to resume, save, discard, or go to the main menu.
In Menu mode, the two buttons on the right act as up/down, the top-left is 'Back', and the bottom-left is 'Enter/Confirm/OK/Select'.
The Lezyne has way more customizability and control in the device itself, and the controls are more complicated to account for this. The Elemnt puts more of the customization into the phone app, which allows them to streamline much of the device's functionality. The Elemnt has more controls, and each of the controls are more specialized -- it's very easy to do common tasks like start/stop/pause, check cue sheet, etc.
Overall, the Elemnt wins, though if you strongly prefer to edit device settings without needing to have a phone on, then the Lezyne is more capable.
Maps
The Wahoo seamlessly has maps downloaded. Wherever you are, you're going to have maps with roads and trails on the screen. I haven't really thought about maps on the device at all, it's always Just Worked. The Wahoo also has an extremely impressive storage capacity - I've been using it to record rides and store routes for two years, and I have 1.2GB free.The Lezyne doesn't come with any maps downloaded, at all. I suppose this saves on disk space. To sync a map to the device, you:
- go on the Lezyne GPS Root website
- create a rectangle of the map you want
- it generates the map for a few minutes
- save the map to the device (via USB cable)
Evidently, the map data generated from the website does not enable offline routing, but it enables some actual map display on the device. I'm not entirely sure what's going on with this, to be honest, as I lost all map display on a ride recently. I've opened a support request with Lezyne, and will update when I hear back. (UPDATE October 19 2019: I have not heard back.)
The mobile app can also be used to generate maps and download to the device, but it takes *forever* to do this. The Lezyne uses BlueTooth Low Energy, which is extremely slow. The maps generated by the mobile app do seem to allow offline routing, but they require much more space on the device.
Where the map of a huge chunk of the front range was 9MB, the mobile app errors with "Map Section Too Large" until I narrowed it down to about half of the Denver metro area, which resulted in a 71MB map file. The app then attempted to send this file to the Lezyne for about 30 minutes. It finally fails with a generic "We have no idea what went wrong" error message. There was nowhere near enough space on the device, and it would have been easy to check that beforehand without wasting half an hour.
There's no way to "free" a downloaded map from the Lezyne from the phone app or device itself, so it seems like you'll just fill the device up if you don't have access to a computer. The offline routing is just too limited to be useful with the space limitations on the device. Speaking of space limitations, I wonder what happens if it runs out of space during a ride - will it just silently fail to record it?
If the Lezyne delivered on it's promise, it should easily win here. It does not. The sketchy software and limited space for offline routing renders the feature nearly useless.
Syncing Routes
With the Elemnt Bolt, I've had the following workflow:- Create a route with RideWithGPS
- It automatically syncs to my phone and device
- Go!
The Lezyne is a bit different. You have to upload a GPX or TCX file to their GPS Root website. Then you manually sync it to your phone. Then you can send that to the device. You technically could use the GPS Root website to create a route, but it's remarkably awful -- either Strava or RideWithGPS would be better. TCX exports from RideWithGPS have turn-by-turn directions, so this is probably the best way to go.
There's a promising "Strava Routes" link on the website, but it says "Coming Soon" with no estimated time or announcement or anything useful. This is annoying. There hasn't been an update on the site since middle of last year, so who knows when it'll actually get implemented. (UPDATE October 19 2019: They have removed the 'Strava Routes' lmao).
The Elemnt wins this one. It has one fewer step, and it syncs automatically with Strava and RideWithGPS. The Lezyne requires a few additional steps, but is ultimately just as capable as the Wahoo.
Using Routes
The Elemnt is pretty nice for this. You open the Wahoo app, click "Routes", and select a route (or "Route Me Anywhere"). Once you've selected a route, it sends the cue sheet and directions to the device. You can select a route on the device, as well, though the interface is a bit clunkier. |
| You also get a nice little topological profile of the hills you're about to climb. This is a nice way to know if you're finally done with all the climbing. |
 |
| Cue sheet view |
The Lezyne draws the entire route on the map. This is extremely nice for getting back on track after a detour.
The Wahoo is fairly sensitive to going off-route. If the trail was recently redeveloped and moved several feet to the right/left, then it'll think you've gone off route, and start whining at you. Since Wahoo doesn't draw the trace unless you're on the route, this can leave you without navigation until you convince the Bolt that you're where you need to be.
 |
| Routing view, with speed, |
Selecting a route on the Lezyne is a bit more convoluted. You click the menu icon in the top left of the screen, tap "Navigate", tap the three dots in the top *right* of the screen, click "Saved Routes", click the route you want, and finally click "GO" in the bottom right of the screen. You have to have synced a route previously to the GPS Root website for it to appear here. There is no option to select a saved route from the GPS device directly; you must have the device connected to the phone.
One nice thing that the Lezyne has over the Elemnt is that it can direct you to the start of a route using the on-the-fly routing, which I will cover in the next section. This is an excellent feature.
The Elemnt has a single routing screen, and you can toggle between a map view and a cue-sheet view. The cue-sheet view has an option to "Reverse route" which just tells you to do everything in reverse. This can be useful if you have a one-way route and want to turn it into an out-and-back. When you are riding, you can also select "Trace back to start," and it'll reverse your route to get you where you started. It also tells you how many miles are left in the route, and you can scroll through the entire cue sheet.
The Lezyne has three routing screens.
 |
| The first tells you the immediate next cue, your current speed, and the ride time. There's no way to view any more cues than the next one, so if you want to know a few turns in advance, you're hosed. |
 |
| The second screen is a "Path" tracer display. It's not attached to a map of any sort, and will trace your route as you do it. I have no idea what the point of this is, it appears to be totally useless. |
 |
| The third screen is the actual map. When there's a turn upcoming, it'll flash a popup on the top saying how far away the turn is and which direction to turn. It does not tell you a street name, even if it knows one (from the cue sheet). |
A recent update has allowed up to two customizable data screens for the Lezyne. This is nice, but they take up a huge amount of valuable map
The Lezyne also offers "Trace back to start," but it hasn't ever worked for me. The device just kinda sits there, ignoring the phone. Fortunately you can just follow your old line in the map view, but it's nice to get alerts that there's a turn coming up.
On-the-fly Routing
Suppose you get off track and need to re-route.If you've got the Elemnt Bolt, you're kind of hosed. The Bolt app allows you to click a point on a map, search for landmarks or addresses, and get turn-by-turn directions directly to that point. There is no option to change the route, and you only get one choice. The Bolt's routing seems to favor highways and other nasty roads, and there's no way to get it to favor a backroad setup. I've also had it route me down roads that were closed or impassible, which is a pretty huge issue.
Wahoo claims that they get everything from Google, but they clearly don't. I've compared the Wahoo app's route to Google Maps directions, and Google Maps consistently gives multiple better options. The Wahoo route is not even represented on the Google Maps search.
The workarounds are a bit clumsy. For the first issue, the best thing to do is click a point on the map that takes you on the waypoint you want. When you arrive there, enter a new route. Repeat until you've done what you want. Yuck. It's exceedingly difficult to get it to select bike paths, so I usually just use Google Maps on my phone for navigation - the audio gets piped into my Trekz headphones, which works well enough for me.
This is a big negative aspect to the Wahoo, and this is where the Lezyne really (finally) shines. The Lezyne phone app is a dream to use for navigation. Much like Strava or RideWithGPS, you get a map view. You tap a waypoint, and it suggests a few options to get there. You select one (or accept the default), and click another waypoint. You repeat until the route looks like you want it, then you send it the device. It's not quite as nice as RideWithGPS, but it's easily the best mobile route creation I've seen. Why isn't the rest of their software this good?
The Lezyne is the clear winner. The Elemnt just isn't even trying. If the device had more storage for offline maps and routing, then the Lezyne would really be onto something with this for adventuring. Its really unfortunate that it is plagued with so many other problems - it feels like a 1000HP engine that's been slapped on a bicycle. Sure, one part is truly amazing, but you can't actually use it because the rest of the device is totally incapable of taking advantage of it.
Recording/Syncing Rides
The Elemnt is fantastic at this.There's a great big "START" button. You hit it, and it starts recording.If you don't hit it, and start moving, it'll beep and flash and ask if you want to start recording -- I've used this a few times, as I occasionally forget to start recording. When I come to a stop, the "auto-pause" screen pops up, and there's an option to end the ride and save it.
After I've saved it, it'll sync through the Elemnt app over Bluetooth, and in a few seconds, it'll be uploaded to Strava (and RideWithGPS). The Bolt assumes that if you've logged in to a website through the app that you want to sync to it -- reasonable. If it's a 100 mile ride or something, it might take 15-30 seconds for the entire process to complete.
You can turn off the device mid-ride, and it'll save the current ride. When you turn it back on, it asks if you want to resume it. This even works if the ride was interrupted due to the battery running out.
The Lezyne is much worse. You have to manually enable all of the syncing stuff by digging into all the various menus. There's a FAQ entry with a number of steps to perform this process.
On my first test ride, I went through the FAQ and had everything setup. The Lezyne GPS had my Strava starred segments loaded, so I figured it'd be fine to sync rides.
The bottom right button starts the ride. To stop the ride, you hold the "Start/Lap" button, click it again (as a down button) to select "Save" on the menu, and finally hit the "Enter" button.
For the first test ride, I waited 45 minutes for it to sync to Strava. It did not sync the ride to my phone until I manually synced it. When I manually synced the ride, it did upload to the Lezyne Root website. It did not copy the "personal note" item, which seems like a bug.
I redid all my sync stuff, and did a quick walk around my apartment to get another ride tested. This one synced immediately and worked fine. Hopefully the first attempt was a first time glitch, and I won't see it again. In either case, I'm unimpressed with how clunky that was.
After several more rides with the Lezyne, it "mostly" works. If there is any kind of hiccup with the BlueTooth connection at any point during the ride, then the whole ride fails to upload, and you will need to manually sync. If you attempt to use navigation, then you will need to manually upload. It's fairly flaky.
It does not save rides if you turn off the device mid-ride. It loses them - forever!
The Elemnt wins this one. It's a nicer device that's easier to use and has fewer bugs and failure possibilities.
Battery Life
I've used the Elemnt Bolt on several tours, centuries, and bikepacking trips. If you run the backlight, navigation, and have a few sensors connected, then you can expect about 8 hours. If you switch off the backlight, that gets up to about 12 hours, and to get the marketed 15 hours, you need to switch off navigation, the LEDs, and disconnect your sensors.It's enough for a long day's riding, but you need to charge it every night. I wanted something I could charge less frequently, and thus I bought the Lezyne.
The Lezyne is similar, in that every feature you use reduces the battery life. One thing the Lezyne does that is clever is "Adaptive Recording." Basically, the device doesn't track points if it can get away with it -- if you're moving at a mostly constant speed in a straight line, it'll record points up to 12 seconds apart. This can result in some weird tracking information. I disabled it during a fatbike ride, as it was not registering movement, and turning it off caused it to detect the ride appropriately.
For a bikepacking ride, where you don't really need the most accurate tracking, then this is a fine trade off. But for everyday riding, the loss in precision can make it annoying.
Another good feature for extending battery life is a brightness control on the backlight. You can adjust it in 5% intervals, and 25% is plenty to see at night. This must save a lot of power, though I am not sure exactly how to test that.
I haven't tested the battery life as thoroughly as the Elemnt, so my experiences are more limited here. I did a day ride with about 6 hours of riding total. The Lezyne started with a full charge. I had the backlight running at 25%, navigation (for the last five hours...), Adaptive Recording off, and two sensors connected. It was cold out; temperatures ranged from 11-39 degrees Fahrenheit. At the end of the ride, the Lezyne complained that it was on low battery. Six hours! That's less than the Elemnt with comparable usage, though the Elemnt hasn't been tested with this temperature before, and the low temps certainly contributed to poor battery life. I also don't know how much longer it'll last on low battery than the Bolt - the Bolt has a pretty linear power curve, so the difference from 100% to 90% takes about as long as the time from 10% to 0%.
I did another test at home, with the device sitting on my couch. Auto-pause was turned off, adaptive recording was off, and it had a 25% backlight. It ran the battery down to "empty" in about 5 hours, but it kept trucking for another 6 hours before I went to bed. In those six hours, it wouldn't connect to my phone, so it must disable Bluetooth with low battery. This is a totally artificial test, as it might have other clever tricks to prevent recording identical GPS points.
Per the Lezyne support forum, if the battery dies while you're on a long ride, the you lose the entire ride! The Wahoo will save your current ride and suspend it, so you can recover the ride after you get to a charge. This is a massive failing. Unfortunately, for this reason, I can't tell you exactly how long it limped along in lower power mode - but it can get at least 11 hours.
The Lezyne wins this one. It doesn't win by as much as the 48 hour claim would suggest, but it's good. I'd like to test it on a bikepacking trip, but it is currently February in Denver, and I'm evidently not brave enough for winter camping just yet.
Notifications
Both the units support receiving notifications from your phone.
The Elemnt only notifies of phone calls and SMS text messages from an SMS text messaging app - if you use Google Fi and Hangouts (or an alternative app), then you won't get text message notifications.
The Lezyne is capable of notifying you of anything that your phone gets, including email, Facebook messenger, Telegram, etc. I found the feature to be annoying and turned it off. However, I think with some clever phone notification 'do-not-disturb' modes that filtered to a select few apps or conversations, this could be really nice for group communication over a wider range of channels.
The Lezyne wins this one.
Support
I've opened a few support tickets with Wahoo, and have always received updates and notifications within three days. I have no complaints about the support I've received. When I requested features or improvements, I was politely ignored. This isn't the best service, but it's understandable. UPDATE 2019-10-19: They've put in the "draw the entire map line" feature, which I complained about here. No idea if they're reading this, but if they are, thanks for the awesome app and device!I've opened a ticket with Lezyne for the offline maps issue I noted above, and I'm not particularly impressed. I opened the ticket, provided a link to relevant files, and it took nine days to receive a response. The response asked for screenshots from my phone to show me downloading the maps, so I tried to create a shot-by-shot depiction. Ironically, their process started bugging out, and would spend 15 minutes generating a map square that would end up being 0KB (eg a failure). I tried three times (wasting about 45 minutes) to download a map square, picking progressively smaller and smaller rectangles. I gave up at this point.
Lezyne just released a new firmware update that contains references to two of the problems I've been having. I have no idea if my support tickets are driving these updates, but if they are, that would be pretty amazing. Unfortunately, they're not actually fixing the problems with the device, so it's too bad.
Conclusion
The Wahoo is a better device with better software. The Lezyne has some solid hardware, but the software is sketchy and concerning. As it stands, the Lezyne has two killer advantages:- On-the-fly routing
- Battery life
I'll probably end up selling my Lezyne. The Wahoo's problems are relatively easy to work around - Google Maps and GaiaGPS app can do offline routing now, and you probably are bringing a battery pack anyway for bikepacking. The Lezyne's problems are more serious, and it is less pleasant to use for the usual riding.
UPDATE 2019-10-19: I thought I'd give the Lezyne another chance with the most recent firmware. Looks like it's regressed back to it's previous shitty state as a mostly unusable GPS device. What's the point of a huge battery and offline routing if you can't load routes or store maps?
Not going to lie, I wish this had been published 2 weeks ago, as I just bought the Lezyne... However I got it on sale for $120 so while it may not be killer, it should get the job done and I have an extra $100 in my pocket. Thanks for the review.
ReplyDeleteWish I had read this review earlier as well. Lezyne WILL NOT allow to change data pages on phone unless the device has a strong GPS signal. As in my case gps signal is weak indoors and I can't change data settings for outdoor riding or indoor training on my phone, if I so choose. One must move completely outside (in freezing temps) in order to change data on phone app. Lezyne mega doesn't connect to WiFi.
ReplyDeleteNot what I’ve found. Can make changes inside no problem. Haven’t had any of the problems mentioned in the review either. An early version?
DeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete