Bicycle Odometers

Review by DeeMee : Inexpensive, but works just fine...

For so little money, hard to go wrong unless the product is defective. It wasn't, worked as advertised and quite accurately. Simple to install. Fairly easy to use.

Has a decel/accel (speed tendency) feature which isn't too good. Has a little picture of a cyclist and wheels on it spin forward or backward to show when you are acclerating or decellerating. But it is too small, and hard to see which way the wheels are spinning. Much better would have been an easy to see arrow pointing forward or rearward. Then again, I don't find much use for this, as you normally feel in the pedals if you are speeding up or slowing down.

The plus or minus sign next to speed to show whether you are above or below your current average speed is sometimes nice to have. Other than that, it has speed, average speed, max speed, and a totalizing odometer plus a scan mode which switches every four seconds. I found it accurate especially after bothering to measure the distance in millimeters of one loaded wheel rotation. Simple to input into the device once you have done the measurement. The built in clock function is nice also.

The unit only counts time on the timer when you are moving. This is nice as it doesn't interfere with getting an average speed or riding time should you stop for a few moments. Unit also switches off when wheel isn't moving to save the battery.

I find it seems to do some time averaging of the speed readout which takes 3 seconds to fully even out. Don't know if others similar products work that way, but really this doesn't interfere with the use of the product and is only the result of having a sensor that pulses once per wheel revolution. It also doesn't read below about 2.4 mph which of course is slow enough you are barely able to stay upright anyway.

I also noticed it sometimes double counts every few revolutions. The distance will jump two thousands of a mile rather than one. Maybe a rounding error or some such in the electronics. I have counted rev's of the wheel over a known distance and it isn't counting twice the overal distance shown is accurate. So probably a non-problem unless you compulsively watch the distance readout while riding.

I haven't owned one of these before having only used simple mechanical speedo's and odometers in the past. But this works great and is a handier more useful device. Unless you need cadence or detailed pacing not sure what else you would want this device to do. Cheap enough to replace if damaged, or buy multiples if you have several bikes. Would rate it 4 and 1/2 stars. Just not quite perfect or it would get 5 stars.

Review by Gary H : Great bike computer - I've owned about half a dozen and this is how it compares!

I've been biking for a few years and I'm really into bikes so I usually like to buy the best if I can afford it.
I've owned a cateye computer with temperature and altimeter features .. that ran over $120 or so back in the day. I have various other computers (avocet, nashbar, etc) that cost between 40-120 and I recently purchased a Magellan GPS computer that was way over $200. So, what am I getting at? They basically all do the same thing regardless of price. They have all been reliable, but the features are what you pay for (GPS, altimeter, temperature, wireless, etc).

This past week I bought a pair of electric bikes for my wife and I. I didn't want to go and spend big bucks on another bike computer. I went to performance bikes and they had a few on sale for $20. Now, that's cheap. They even had one for $14.99, but I figured I can do better than that and found a wireless Bell bike computer for $19.99. I stopped by another walmart and found the schwinn 12 and 17 function computer for $10 and $15, respectively and decided to take the schwinn 12 func bike computer for $10.

Got home, and set it up on the e-bike. It took about half an hour or so because I actually read the manual carefully. I haven't even ridden the bike yet, but I took it out on a ride the next day and the verdict is:
it does basically the samething all my bike computer does. I don't need gps or temperature or altimeter functions. If I need GPS, I'll put the gps computer on there from my other bike...

I took the e-bike off onto a dirt trail and the ebike was rattling around, but the bike computer had no problems keeping the speed, time, etc. I had no intermitten issues with the bike computer and it's sensor.

The only issue I had with it is that behavior on how to reset the trip computers distance / avg time / max speed. On my cateye, I press the two buttons to reset the current ride (dist to 0, avg time to 0, max speed to 0). When I do this on the Schwinn bike computer, it reset the entire computer and I had to setup the computer again. The way to do it is slightly different: you have to go into the trip computer screen and hold the left button for 2 sec and you reset the current trip.

For $10 it's a steal. If I didn't need it right away, I would have bought it at Amazon - no tax and it's cheaper here!

I'll recommend this cyclometer.

Gary

Review by Andrew Craighead : Great Product

I picked one of these up and thought it was too cheap to be decent, but it actually ended up doing everything I would need. Install was very easy, operation is easy, and it's cheap! If you don't need cadence this is a great cycle computer.