The Pro's Closet had open box Edge 840 for under $300 before Black Friday, and at that price it was too good to resist. The big feature that I wanted that's not available on the Fenix 5X is Freeride Climb Pro, which Garmin has said that it will not bring to watches because the watches have to deal with runners and Freeride Climb Pro is just too hard to do for runners. The other feature is that it now charges via USB-C, which saves one more cable type to bring (though unfortunately most of my bike lights are still micro-USB, so I can't avoid having a few adapters when I travel with the bike)
Ok, coming from using my Fenix 5X as a bike computer, the Edge 840 feels like it's a giant screen. Garmin has also revamped its UI, so you get choices between Road, Gravel, Commute, MTB. In addition, the Edge 840 has both buttons and touch screen, and I found myself using both UIs! The map display is excellent, and Garmin no longer tries to rip you off by charging for European maps if you happen to buy a US unit.
The 32GB storage is not enough to store both US maps and European maps at the same time! I was quite disappointed by that. Storage is cheap, and you would think that Garmin would take $10 out of its profit margins to give me both US and European maps at the same time. The nice thing is that Garmin with its new UI can now display graphs, so you can get a nice climbing graph or power meter graph.
Climb Pro behaves as I expect, giving you its best guess as to what hill I'm going to ride, and despite some friends telling me it wasn't accurate, it seemed to work just fine for my favorite hills. For grins I tried the structured workout mode and it told me after the workout that I did a horrible job of complying with the workout.
I rarely follow routes, but when I tried it as an experiment, whenever I go off route (which I invariably do) the UI now gives me an option to pause navigation (if you know where you're going) or to route back onto the route. Sweet!
Charging is fast, and battery life is good enough that I never have to charge it more than once a week. Syncing to Garmin connect is fast as well, and it brings over all the sensors from my old Fenix 5X no problem, including HRMs, speed sensors, cadence sensors, etc. Stay within the Garmin ecosystem and everything works great.
Startup is also superfast. I can no longer play the game of starting up the computer and taking off at rocket speed to keep the GPS confused for as long as possible. All in all, it's a great device and I'm looking forward to touring with it!
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