I've carried my Garmin eTrex hand-held a couple of times before I found gmap-pedometer.com to get distance and route maps, but it was a drag as I didn't mount it on the bike, I only put it in a jersey pocket.
A guy I ride with used his Garmin 305 until he lost it on a ride. He liked it except for:
- battery life: Fine for local rides but not enough for a double century. He'd get maybe 10 - 11 hours out of the battery and eventually found a cheesy battery pack to use with it to extend the life, but had a few problems with the 305 resetting.
- gradient: The software gradient function on the device is crap. It jumps around every second and seldom gives you the actual current gradient when you're climbing. He'd watch it bounce around: 6% 9% 5% 12% 10% 5% 16%... within a 10 second period. He took it up with some of the Garmin software guys in the motionbased.com forums but they said that they wanted to provide the best most-updated data to the user. When you're going up a steady 7% hill, it's no good if your gradient jumps around between 4% and 16% every second or two. So far HAC4 and VDO are the only computers that I've seen that do gradient well.
Other than that he had no complaints and said that for a first try the device was pretty good.
It doesn't do any on-screen mapping from what I've seen/heard though. It works well with Google maps through motionbased.com though.
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