Garmin 130 put through its paces
The powerhouse of ride data has gone back to basics, yielding a very impressive final product. Rupert Radley crunches the numbers
The Garmin Edge 130 is a miniature model of the Garmin Edge 1030 and while it doesn’t have all the features the top-of-the-range computer has, it’s more powerful than its small size might suggest — and it has impressed me more than any Garmin device has for a long time.
With the Edge 130, Garmin has performed an about turn on the direction of its last computer, the Garmin 1030. Whereas that is the largest computer in the brand’s range, the Edge 130 is one of the smallest, with dimensions of 4.1x6.3x1.6cm and a 1.8in screen.
Some might think the new size a bit extreme, but it works very well. Whereas the 1030 is absolutely enormous and feels precariously balanced out in front of the bike, the bijou Edge 130 suits it very well.
It’s basically a very small plastic housing with plastic buttons, and as such it weighs a meagre 33g, which is a long way short of the 123g of the 1030.
I’m also relieved Garmin hasn’t pursued its touchscreen technology at this level. The buttons partner the device’s no-nonsense, pared back purpose very well. They’re basic, and the feedback from them isn’t brilliant but they’re functional and dependable.
Despite its diminutive size the screen’s display is sharp, and while I might hesitate to display the full eight data fields possible, I’ve been running five on my main screen and it’s crisp and easy to read even though it’s so small.
Performance
In short, this is probably the bestperforming Garmin Edge device I’ve used. Removing the touchscreen seems to have removed Garmin’s buggy software, and I’ve not had any dropped rides, deleted activities or raindrop interference. In fact, the only frustration has been how slow it is at picking up GPS: at one point it took 2.5km before it located a satellite and it wasn’t very accurate when laid over a map. I’ve also noticed that it’s slow to adjust your travelling speed, reacting a lot more slowly than my accelerations at lights.
Admittedly, this was in GPS mode, and the Edge 130 can receive GLONASS signals as well as brand-new Galileo satellite signals.
Although it doesn’t have a base map, the Garmin Edge 130 is capable of limited navigation. If you load in a course it’ll present you with a line on a blank screen. It’s not very useful because the size of the screen means that to see the whole route it has to be very zoomed out, rendering it a little impractical.
However, impressively for its size, the Edge 130 can do turn-by-turn navigation, although I could only make it do this by creating the route on Garmin Connect rather than uploading a TCX file from Strava, which is my preferred method.
Garmin claims the battery will last 15 hours, and I found that despite its small size I could get around four days of commutes and short rides out of the device when in standard GPS mode — no doubt helped by the lack of touchscreen and an unnecessary colour display.
In fact, that’s what I like the most about the Garmin Edge 130: it has done away with the unnecessary, and I realise now that I don’t miss those things at all on my rides or in my training. While the top-tier models can conduct FTP tests, interval training sessions and probably measure your Vo2max, I don’t need that because that’s not the type of rider I am.
That’s not to say that the Edge 130 isn’t powerful, because it is. It will display all the usual metrics like power, cadence, speed, time etc, and give you live Strava segments, but it’s not weighed down by trying to do it all. It feels like Garmin has stripped back its models, made them smaller but also more functional and the result is a much-improved computer.
Garmin has a tendency to produce the more expensive head units on the market, but the new £169.99 Edge 130 is a step into more competitive territory for the brand, going directly against the featurepacked Wahoo ELEMNT Bolt and the astonishingly good-value Lezyne Super GPS.
“The bijou Edge 130 is well suited to the front of a bike”