Garmin Edge 705

The keen-eyed will no doubt have spotted photos of the Milram team riders opting to use Garmin's Edge 305 GPS/training tool for tracking their progress on stages, providing such information as speed, cadence, heart rate, altitude and much more. The new 705 takes a significant step forward, here's the lowdown.

Garmin's Edge bike-specific GPS has proved to be a popular training tool, although pretty much everyone we've spoken too wishes it was a bit more useful for navigation too - it's a neat bit of kit, but the feature set is distinctly oriented towards keeping track of where you've been (and how hard you've been working) rather than telling you where to go.

Those wanting navigation capabilities have had to go for Garmin's outdoor GPS range - eTrex, GPSMap, that kind of thing - which are bulkier and of course don't do the training-related logging quite as well as the Edge.

Now, though, Garmin has made the obvious next step and combined the two strands into one new unit. The Edge 705 takes the big colour screen, navigation features, uploadable maps and joystick-based controls of the bigger GPSes, mixes in the training-oriented heart rate/cadence features of the Edge and packages the whole lot in a unit that's somewhat bigger than the existing Edge but still handily bar- or stem-mountable.

It's also compatible with PowerTap hubs (if you're wealthy enough to have such a device), so you can really get very statgeeky indeed. More on prices and availability soon...

www.garmin.com