15 May 2024
SRAM & Hammerhead have just released the latest version of their GPS cycling computer, the “new Karoo”. This unit combines much asked for hardware updates, with a smattering of software updates, to provide a natural evolution over the existing Karoo 2.
This model represents the first hardware variant produced since SRAM’s acquisition. Yet despite that, the Hammerhead team operates largely independently – choosing their own component/manufacturing factories and more. Of course, as you’ll see, there’s certainly increased integration with SRAM. This pattern is roughly the same as other SRAM-acquired brands, like Zipp.
In any event, the new Karoo 3 is almost entirely a hardware-focused upgrade. But they are notable ones: A much brighter screen, a loud AF beeper, 30% more battery life, and more. There are just a handful of tiny software features/differences to the existing Karoo 2, as the Karoo 2 has been getting continual updates that the Karoo 3 just rolls right in. Nonetheless, I’ve been riding with the Karoo 3 for a few months now, putting it through its paces on multiple continents with quite varied riding conditions. From steamy and sunny, to dumping rain in the cold mountains, and everything in between.
Except, technically, it’s not called the ‘Karoo 3’, but rather just the ‘Karoo’. Hammerhead is specifically concerned about associations with the term ‘K3’ and its connection in same regions to a bunch of dumb white-sheet wearing morons. However, when I search for that term, I just get a Belgium pop girl that sings the song Mango-Mango. Of course, like everything else, I’m just gonna call it like it is – it’s the Karoo 3.
As usual, this Karoo is a media loaner, and it’ll go back to SRAM. After which I’ll go out and get my own for any future testing needs. Further, while I did attend a media event a few months ago, I paid for all my own travel/flights and accommodations. If you found this review useful, you can use the links at the bottom, or consider becoming a DCR Supporter which makes the site ad-free, while also getting access to a mostly weekly video series behind the scenes of the DCR Cave. And of course, it makes you awesome.
With that, let’s get into it!
(Oh, and stay tuned for my arriving shortly in-depth review of the new SRAM RED AXS groups and corresponding power meter, which I’ve been riding for a few months now.)
What’s New:
Virtually everything new here is hardware based, and very minor at that. Still, there are some differences and these differences are largely things that people have asked for. Let’s dive into them, starting on the hardware side.
– Increased display brightness
– Added Corning Gorilla Glass cover, increasing visibility
– Added ambient light sensor (to change display brightness in realtime)
– Increased button “crispness”
– Improved rain performance handling
– Increased internal space to 64GB (from 32GB)
– Increased RAM to 4GB (from 2GB)
– Increased processor to 2Ghz (from 1.1Ghz)
– Increased audio chirp level to JFC loud levels
– Added dedicated/new power button
– Decreased weight to 118g (from 132g)
– Removed SIM card slot
– Added phone companion app for syncing rides/routes/workouts/firmware notices/etc
– Added dual-frequency/multi-band GNSS/GPS
– Increased battery size to 3,200mAh (from 2,800mAh)
– Increased battery duration by 30% due to “significant battery subsystems work”
– Revamped Hammehread Mounting system (called HMS) with adjustable plate and new screw system
– Changed to Android 12 64-bit (Karoo 2 is on Android 8 32-bit)
– Increased price to $474 from $399
Now, on the software side, most things are the same. Except, there are a few things not coming to the Karoo 2, for reasons that frankly Hammerhead can’t seem to justify, and some that they can. Of course, that’s not much different than Garmin not justifying why the Edge 830 isn’t getting new software features the Edge 840 got. The only difference is that Hammerhead sorta made their ‘brand’ all about continual updates for existing models. Garmin has historically made their ‘brand’ about not updating existing models (albeit, that has ever so-slowly gotten better).
In the case of Hammerhead, the Karoo 2 won’t get connectivity to the companion app, due to hardware restraints on the Karoo 2. Likewise, there are UI tweaks that aren’t coming to the Karoo 2 either (such as some of the structured workout bits).
Now, let’s take a closer look at the new display brightness, First at 0% brightness level (indoors and outdoors in direct sun):
Then at 40% brightness indoors and outdoors (I’m doing both indoors/outdoors because it can be a bit easier to see the differences indoors).
And then at 100% brightness:
Though, the most obvious is definitely with the black data fields in direct sun (and no, those aren’t scratches, just smudges, the Karoo is a fingerprint magnet):
Now, while it is much brighter – I’ll say that having ridden some 800km side by side with the trio of the Hammerhead Karoo 3, the Garmin Edge 840, and Wahoo ROAM V2, the Karoo 3 is the least viewable of the three. But, it’s not hard to see either. I’ve written tons in super bright sunny conditions of the Canary Islands and Florida, and never had an issue viewing the Karoo 3 screen. Taking video/photo of the screen is hardware, but that’s a photography problem, but not a real eyesight problem (and thus, be wary of reviews that don’t differentiate between those two things, which is always a challenge taking a photo of a small dark screen against a bright white/outdoor background). Still, here’s all three, in mostly direct sunlight (my arm is slightly blocking the Edge 840), and the Karoo’s brightness at 100% on a hot 92*F day:
Here’s another shot, on a not-so-hot Netherlands day, but still direct sun:
I used both Dark and Light user interface modes in these high-sun areas, and generally found the light mode worked better in sun. But that’s just my personal preference.
Hardware & Configuration Options:
First up is powering on the Karoo, which requires holding down the button on the bottom near the charging port. This is a new button added to the Karoo 3, and I appreciate it. Though, I do wish all the buttons had some sort of etched labels on them. Hammerhead’s idea is that this allows buttons to be dynamic and assigned in software. But I think there’s still value for new users in having glanceable etching on the side of key buttons.
In any case, the Karoo 3 has five buttons in total, including two on each side. This is in addition to the touchscreen found across the entire top display.
Hammerhead talks about new improvements on the screen, both from a visibility standpoint, but also a rain usage standpoint. For better or worse, I’ve got to test both of those areas in-depth. On the screen visibility, I talked about that up-top, so, let’s cover the rain. First, there’s the ‘Rain Lock’ feature (swipe from the top), which does exactly what it says: Locks the screen. But, setting that aside, what about just riding in the rain? Ironically, I essentially started and ended my multi-month test period with heavy rains. Last night I got rolling thunderstorms, and just slammed with rain. I didn’t use the rain lock at all, and was able to easily swipe between data pages and the menus (see the video for the full segment):
Now, I suppose we should briefly talk about the slight updated mount. The Karoo uses the Hammerhead Mounting System (HMS, no relation to Her Majesty’s Ship). It’s their own mount design that lets you slide the unit in front the front, with about an 1/8th of a turn to lock it. It’s perfectly fine. The updated mount design both adds a lower-level GoPro mount adapter (also usable for lights), as well as ensures that the bolt on the mount (for the handlebars) can no longer fall out the bottom. Further, it allows front/back adjustability of the underside GoPro mount.
But, the world of 3rd party bike mounts mostly runs on Garmin quarter-turn mounts, so thankfully Hammerhead included an adapter, which I’ve also used (for many years).
With the unit started up, you’ve got the main screen shows your ride profiles. These are basically customizable profiles that contain your data pages and settings. In my case, I’ve got one titled ‘DCR Road Profile’, and another for ‘Trainer Profile’. If you’ve got an existing Karoo unit, it’ll offer to migrate all these over.
You can tweak these profiles by tapping the four dots in the lower left corner, which opens up the main menu area. Here you can change the Profiles, but also see past rides, planned routes, structured workouts, pair sensors, and all assortment of other settings. Also, if you’ve got 3rd party Android apps (like the screen recorder app I have here), you’ll see that in the list too.
Looking at the ride profiles you can add data pages, change routing preferences (e.g. dirt, pavement, gravel), change turn-by-turn and notification settings, and plenty more. When I look at areas where Hammerhead has surpassed Wahoo, it’s these sorts of details that matter. It’s how you compete with the likes of Garmin, and Hammerhead shifted about 1-2 years ago into nailing all these little details.
From a data page standpoint, you can tweak your layouts here, and add more pages. Data pages can have up to 10 fields per page, including both straight numbers as well as chart-like metrics. It’s generally pretty flexible.
All of these are tweaked on the unit itself, rather than the companion app. Instead, the companion app at this point is really more about syncing data, than tweaking data. In fact, at the moment, you can’t tweak anything on the Karoo from your phone. However, it sounds like Hammerhead sees this as the start of the true companion app journey, rather than the end-state (previously the app only surfaced notifications, now it pulls in all the data you actually care about).
Before we talk sensors, we’ve got the rest of the settings. Most of these are pretty straight forward. Stuff like uploading to Strava and TrainingPeaks, but also ones that include having Heatmaps populate, via a partnership with Suunto. I dive into the maps down below though.
You can also customize your power and heart rate zones, though that’s pretty much the end of any physiological metrics. Unlike Garmin, there’s literally nothing else here in that realm of training status/recovery/etc. In talking to Hammerhead, it doesn’t sound like they have any intention on expanding that area either. I suppose without the bigger picture data from a wearable, it’s hard to get useful recovery type metrics. Note you can configure power zones over on the Hammerhead Dashboard website too.
Additional settings include pairing a Bluetooth audio headset/headphones, which would allow you to hear alerts on headphones, but also let you playback apps like Spotify, if you side-loaded those (here’s a whole post on how to do that).
One of the most useful changes though with the new companion app is the ability to have Live Tracking via your phone’s data plan, rather than having to buy/maintain an extra SIM card (because the SIM card is now gone in the Karoo 3). The companion app, once paired, will automatically then broadcast your position on your Live Tracking map.
Once you toggle this page off/on again, you’ll get a new QR code, killing off the old one (otherwise, it’ll stay the same). The map page is accessed via a QR code that you can share from the settings page shown above. It’ll bring you to this map here:
The only annoying part though is that it doesn’t show your historical track prior to loading the webpage, and each time you re-load the webpage, it resets that for the viewer, which is just downright stupid. Here I am nearly 2 hours into the ride, and it just shows my planned route in yellow, but by now I took a very different route for the bottom half of this whole thing.
So lastly we get into the sensors piece. The Hammerhead Karoo supports both ANT+ & Bluetooth Smart sensors, including things like power meters, heart rate sensors, speed/cadence sensors, cycling radar, cycling lights, and more. These are all paired within the Sensors menu, in a form of a sensor ‘pool’, meaning that each ride profile can use sensors as they see fit. So you can have multiple power metes (thus bikes) paired without issue. However, if you want to limit one power meter to a specific ride profile, you can do that too. The world is your oyster.
In addition, Hammerhead (now owned by SRAM) has further expanded the Karoo’s integration with SRAM sensors. In fact, it’ll automatically pull in your SRAM sensors/equipment into your Karoo, via your SRAM account. This includes all your shifting, power meters, blips, tire pressure sensors and more. It’ll even specify which bike it’s from (within your SRAM AXS App/Account), in little text above it. And, it’ll group them by bikes too, so you know it’s all tied together. It’s super well executed.
Likewise, you’ll also get alerts for low batteries as well:
Of course, the situation with Shimano has not changed. Shimano infamously yanked access to show Shimano Di2 shifting data from Di2 group sets two years ago, after what has essentially amounted to an internal Shimano miscommunication failure. One that once occurred, they were unwilling to admit their mistake on. In fact, a Shimano rep once described it best as “there were no adults in the room”. Unfortunately, Shimano continues to be unwilling to press undo on that licensing revocation.
While there are 3rd party workarounds (and they are really quite great, ‘https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2022/12/hammerhead-karoo-2-shimano-di2-workaround.html), it’s still not the same as native-level integration. Hammerhead/SRAM noted they even flew Japan to try and meet with Shimano about it, but Shimano refused to meet on the subject.
Ultimately, just like it was two years ago – this only hurts Shimano customers. Shimano doesn’t make a competing head unit, and with the vast (overwhelming) majority of Hammerhead users on Shimano Di2 (Hammerhead has this data via sensor data, but wouldn’t let me print the precise number), this continues to simply hurt Shimano’s own customers. After all, nobody else (Garmin/Wahoo/etc…) blocks Shimano power meters from connecting to their bike computers, simply because they make a competing unit. Albeit, given the well known accuracy issues of Shimano power meters…that’d probably be doing those people a favor.
In any event, with everything all set, let’s get into the details of daily riding.
Daily Riding:
To start your ride, you’ll either tap the lower right yellow play button on the screen (or corresponding physical button), or, tap the ride profile you want first, then do the same.
When it comes to lag, everything feels pretty much just as laggy as before. It’s a smidge faster, yes, but not some major amount. You can see this in the video where I show them side by side. I find it gets slightly more laggy the longer into a ride you go, or with more things (like routing/etc…) enabled. It’s not a deal breaker, and most of the lag is in the pre-ride menus.
In any event, with that, you’ve got two options for the data pages: Light mode or Dark mode. You can toggle between them by swapping down from the top. Generally speaking, I found dark mode good for darker/rainy days (every day in The Netherlands), and light mode good for sunny days (every day outside The Netherlands).
Of course, as you ride, you’ll see your data fields update accordingly (unless you crash), and then you can change between them by either shipping or pressing the two upper buttons (left or right side).
And, if you’re on SRAM’s newest RED AXS system and the bonus button, you can also configure the remote buttons to change data page or other functions:
All of this works exactly like you’d expect. I haven’t any issues here from a during-ride standpoint, every ride was spot-on and I saw no crashes or loss of data. I’ll likely hit about 1,000km on the Karoo 3 in the next few days.
Moving along, you can also do structured workouts on the Karoo. Hammerhead has long had TrainingPeaks integration (so workouts can be pushed to the Karoo), but recently they also added TrainerRoad integration too. I wrote about that in more depth here, so definitely check that out.
However, interestingly, the user interfaces between the Hammerhead Karoo 2 and Karoo 3 are actually different in this area. The Karoo 3 has a new pop-up drawer (just like the maps/Strava Live Segments one), that has the structured workout. In theory, this would be better, but in practice, within that drawer, it’s somehow worse. This isn’t the drawers fault, that part is great (and should stay), but the new UI took something that was already bad (structured workouts on the Karoo), and somehow made it even worse.
Above is a great example, the purple section is the actual interval – the black section behind it is a custom data page I had to make to show the actual target power. That red line with the square on it, the square shows the target range. Why on earth doesn’t it tell me the target range? Here’s how this looks on other bike computers – note the target range specified (Wahoo in upper left: 319-339w, Garmin at top: 319-33w). Note the lap power displayed on Garmin, and 3-second trailing on Wahoo. Note the trend graph showing too. None of this is tough stuff – just copy what everyone else has done.
As I said in my post about the structured workouts, it’s easily the weakest part of the ecosystem, and I’m reasonably convinced nobody at Hammerhead actually uses it. It just lacks the types of information you’d actually want to see (like clearly marked numerical power ranges, trailing averages in those ranges, etc…). It’s just not super usable.
On the bright side, this is a good time to bring up the audio alerts. They’re insanely louder now. A moment ago while writing the structured workout section I made the mistake of starting both a Karoo 2 & Karoo 3 side-by-side indoors on my desk. I’d forgotten how insanely loud that beeper is on the Karoo 3 by comparison. The Karoo 2’s is a gentle nudge to alert you. The Karoo 3’s is a sharpened baseball bat to the head. You’re not gonna miss any upcoming turn notification, ever. Nor will your unborn great grandchildren. You can listen to it in the video up above.
In the event it’s too much, you can silence all alerts, by swapping down from the top:
Next, there’s Strava Live Segments. These segments will automatically be pulled in from your favorited list on Strava (with a paid Strava account), and displayed on the Hammerhead Karoo. As in the past, I’d argue Hammerhead easily has the best overall Strava Live Segments display, as it cleanly shows you multiple ‘targets’ (e.g. KOM, your friends, etc…) on the same screen, along with other data like elevation, position relative to the finish, etc… First, you’ll get a warning about an upcoming segment from the drawer (in orange):
As you ride, you’ll see your competitors and placement within the segment. As always, you’ll need to decide at this juncture whether or not to dethrone your friends. At this juncture, given I was screen recording this ride for the review, it left me no choice except to take GPLAMA/Shane Miller down:
Obviously, I easily executed that task, for which the Karoo rewarded me. I even managed to grab a PR, notable because this was a somewhat lazy attempt. Heck – I didn’t even have a tailwind either. Of course, I expect the next time Shane visits, he’ll likely make an earnest effort at collecting some of these back. But for now his loss will be remembered here.
Next, there’s Hammerhead’s Climber feature, which is akin to Garmin’s ClimbPro functionality. This feature will automatically detect and show upcoming climb information, both for routes and non-routes alike. Hammerhead was the first company to take the Garmin ClimbPro concept, and then adapt it to free-riding scenarios. And it worked well here too. You’ll see a new drawer pop-up with the climb details as you approach it:
And then during the climb (this is a different climb, obviously), it’ll show various constantly updating metrics to the top. In this case I’ve expanded out the Climber page, but you can have it half-sized too.
Hammerhead noted that back in March, they significantly updated the mapping for Europe (specifically Europe only) to have better elevation data. One of the issues Hammerhead’s long had, is that their elevation data for Climber is kinda crap. Thus, you’d see all sorts of crazy upcoming gradients that simply weren’t true (either in your favor or not). Having tested this update a bunch on climbs/rides in the Italian Alps and Canary Islands, the data is definitely better than before, but it’s still not amazing.
Still, on the whole the feature is well executed, and I wouldn’t overthink the occasional quirks in tight switchbacks overshadow it too much. Oh, and you can always swipe it down out of the way, like here, where you see the blue bits there indicating a climb, but it’s otherwise hidden from view:
Now, before I forget, I do want to note the smartphone notifications, which can appear on your unit. I want to note them, mainly because it’s annoying. Not the notifications per se, but the fact that you actually can’t (ever) dismiss them from the screen. The only way to dismiss them is to do it from your actual phone. Thus, they’re always there in the grey drawer at the bottom (you can minimize the drawer, but not otherwise dismiss any given notification):
It’s one of those things that’s not a big thing in the grand scheme of stuff, but is super annoying to sit there and see it on a 3-4 hour ride. That said, for a single notification coming in, at last you can see it:
From a battery perspective, Hammerhead claims a 30% longer battery life, and things generally seem to trend that direction. Check out the accuracy section, where I dive into the battery burn testing a bit more.
Now, once your ride is completed, you’ll get a summary of the ride on the unit. While all my rides upload to Strava marked as private by default, I still *LOVE* the fact that I can title the ride here if I want to. That’ll transfer to Strava that way. Super nice touch.
You’ll also see at the bottom which sites it’s going to sync/upload to.
Of course, you won’t see a ton of stats here on this summary page compared to Garmin (or even Wahoo), but more stats are available up on the Hammerhead Dashboard site (along with all your other rides):
With that, let’s dive deeper into navigation, one of the key Hammerhead strengths.
Mapping & Navigation:
Starting with the map side of things, the Hammerhead includes free downloadable maps for anywhere on the planet. Or at least, everywhere I’ve tried to ride (heck, even North Korea can be downloaded!). To download maps, you’ll go to settings, then Offline Maps. It’ll actually even warn you that you don’t have maps for the region you’re in, when you power it on. That’s handy if you travel, and forget to grab maps for it.
You’ll see the list of maps at the top that you’ve already downloaded, and then down below you can select additional countries/regions. It’ll also show ‘Nearby Maps’ (which includes the area you’re in).
When you choose to download a map, there’s two pieces. There’s the fully detailed map itself, but also the Suunto-powered heat map. I always choose both of them.
Downloading happens via WiFi, and obviously depends on how big a map you’re downloading, and how awesome your WiFi is. Again, I appreciate here that Hammerhead allows smaller per-country downloads, rather than the massive 10-15GB downloads that Garmin requires for their maps (which can be rough on hotel wifi, if at all).
With your maps set, then it’s time to navigate somewhere. You’ve got two basic options here: Loading a pre-created route, or navigating on the fly to a given point/location. For the on-the-fly routing, you can drop a pin somewhere. In addition, you can route back to home/start. In theory it supports address navigation, but it simply kept telling me “No Internet Connection” despite very clearly having both WiFi and paired smartphone options connected to the internet:
But dragging a dot around the map is easy enough, and most people tend to do one-off navigation that way, versus typing an address (assuming it’s an easy place to find).
Finally, with the new Hammerhead companion app, you can send addresses from Apple Maps and Google Maps to your Karoo. You’ll use the ‘send to’ option from within those apps, when will then use the Hammerhead companion app to send it to the Karoo, where it’ll show-up as a pin on the Karoo to instantly select.
However, the vast majority of people are probably going to be using a pre-loaded route. This can be from pretty much any of the major platforms, including Strava, Komoot, RideWithGPS, TrainingPeaks, and more (or a GPX/etc route file). You can also use their own site to create routes too:
In my case, I make most of my routes in Strava and Komoot, then then automatically sync into the Karoo. What’s cool here is that you can create collections for these, as I’ve down below. This is something sorely missing from other providers, especially for people like myself that create lots of routes in lots of areas. It just makes it so much easier to sort routes:
These collections carry over to the device too, letting you more quickly browse through them. Of course, you don’t have to create any collections, you can just have a bit list and sort accordingly.
Once you tap on a route, you can see a map of it, the elevation gain, and choose to follow the route in reverse.
After that, you’ll start riding it. You can also select a route mid-ride as well, if you change things up. That said, it doesn’t display the elevation profile for the route, nor does it display the map behind that preview page, which is kinda odd.
As you ride, you’ll see turn notifications automatically displayed. These notifications are part of one of the ‘drawers’ that come out from the bottom, for teh navigation side. There’s also a drawer for Strava Live Segments and Climbing details.
You can swipe up on that yellow drawer to see a list of upcoming turns. Interestingly, and surprisingly, I also get some POI items automatically added (Hammerhead also supports manual ones too). For example, on my ride last night I got ‘Windmill’ added to the list. I have no idea where this came from (Strava, somehow, I presume), though I do appreciate the unit effectively reminding me to adhere to the ‘must always include a windmill photo on any Strava post’ Netherlands rule.
If you go off-course, you’ll get virtually instant and automatic re-routing. This is dynamic, so it’ll figure out the best way to get you back on course up ahead somewhere. You can see the coloring changes of the line here to red (I ignore this turn, and catch-up the route a minute or so later):
Likewise, you can choose to route back to home at any time. Last night during my sunset ride, the thunderstorms got a bit spicy. That by itself wasn’t actually an issue, rather, it was that it darkened things up considerably, such that my finish time was now much darker than I’d planned for not having front lights on the bike. So about 35KM into my large loop, I told the unit to simply route me home in the most direct way possible. It did so, and overall I’m quite pleased with the route it gave me. As always, I made some tweaks in realtime given local knowledge, but it just adjusted accordingly to keep pointing at home. The coloring here on the route line is pink.
Note that the reddish colors on the map is the heat map data. As noted earlier, I’ve had really good luck with all the heat map data here in Europe (and even in parts of the US I’ve ridden), given the number of people with Suunto watches out there (since Suunto provides this data). But, if you’re riding (especially on trails) in an area that’s not popular with Suunto users, then this data is likely to be very thin. But you can see here in The Netherlands, it’s literally fire:
Overall when it comes to mapping and navigation, the Karoo retains its position in the top-2 placement with themselves and Garmin. While Wahoo’s navigation is good (and the ‘push from phone’ instant routes better better), for me the overall on-device details provided by the Karoo push it beyond Wahoo, given I primarily use pre-planned routes rather than on-demand destinations from my phone.
GPS & Elevation Accuracy (and Battery):
In this section I’m going to look at the GPS accuracy of the Karoo 3, as well as the elevation accuracy (altitude). The Karoo 3 includes a new multi-band/dual-frequency GPS/GNSS chipset in it, which should significantly increase GPS accuracy. That does tend to burn more battery, yet, Hammerhead has made the decision (like Wahoo), to have it set as ‘always-on’, versus Garmin’s choice of letting you increase battery life (quite substantially) by reducing the GPS from multi-band to regular GPS. In Hammerhead’s case, I suspect that the battery draw of the GPS chipset is relatively inconsequential compared to the phone-quality level screen battery draw (whereas in Garmin/Wahoo’s case, the GPS chipset is one of the biggest battery draws).
Likewise, on the elevation accuracy, Hammerhead has had issues in the past with massive elevation errors. At a media briefing, the company says those issues were specifically related to a manufacturer error in a specific component, for a specific set of units. I haven’t seen any obvious historical issues on the small fleet of Karoo 2 units I have, which likely just simply means I managed to not get one of the bad ducks.
In any case, with so many rides on this under my belt, I’m mostly going to focus on the more challenging rides/terrain. Or, said differently: Rides where things either did go wrong, or could have gone wrong. I have countless very mundane rides that I’m going to save you from.
With that, I will start with a brief mundane ride, because sometimes the mundane shows off failures the best. This ride in Florida last week was 3.5-hours of back and forth on a very straight road with virtually no elevation gain (a few feet per 20KM loop). It’s a great way to validate how precise the GPS is over the same route, while also looking to spot any obvious elevation devices. Here’s the high-level route, compared to the Wahoo ROAM V2 & Garmin Edge 840:
As you can see, straight as a pencil. Looking more closely along the entire route, I don’t see any meaningful variances off the route/road:
Likewise, looking at elevation, I also don’t see anything too worrisome, note that the scale of this chart might freak you out, till you realize we’re talking an entire range of about 25 meters here. You can see though that only the Garmin appears to be compensating for weather shifts (likely by using GPS to re-correct altitude), whereas the Wahoo & Hammerhead units slowly drift upwards.
From a battery burn standpoint, here’s how the three units compared (with no screen recording on for any of them). In this case for the Karoo 3, I mostly had the map or power pages up, but with no navigation loaded. All were connected to a Varia radar, power meter, and HR strap. The screen brightness was around 40-50%. The estimate of 12.5hrs seems reasonable, given being on the map screen (remember the max is 15 hours here):
Next, let’s look at a climb in Gran Canaria, this one starts off with a slow false-flat for a long while, before eventually a nice switchback laden climb.
Here’s the overall plot and data, including a bunch of watches/units:
We can see on this relatively tame road section, there’s no problems with all the units properly following the road around this interchange (except a bit of offset from the COROS Vertix 2S):
Heading up into the main climb, here’s a switchback section. No issues from any of the bike computers, either on the going up, or the descent back down this same section:
In fact, on the way back down I stopped and did a boatload of back & forth on one particular section (for video stuffs), and you can see it’s spot-on here, all staying on the roadway.
And finally within this ride, if we look at a tunnel (perhaps 150-200m long), we don’t see any entry/exit errors from any units – it just correctly makes a straight line (right where that green GC label is):
Looking at elevation for this plot, overall very close on the climb, but we do see a bit of separation by time we reach the top from all the units. If we look at the section after the first drop, we can see we’ve got a spread of roughly 25-30m between them. The Karoo is notably the lowest of the bunch at 440m, while the others are all clustered around 455-465m. You’d be unlikely to notice this if just riding with a single unit.
Note that for this ride, I was screen recording, thus, looking at battery stats wouldn’t make much sense. Still, despite the screen recording, the Karoo 3 showed it was on-target for about 11 hours of battery life (including having a course loaded, and mostly being on the Climb & Navigation pages).
Next, another climb in Gran Canaria. This one I started from a boat (well, I got off the boat), and then immediately headed up a long hour+ climb, some 1,000m of gain, before looping back around to town. Here’s the high-level view:
If we look at some of the really tricky switchback sections, we see it’s essentially flawless. All the units are, when going upwards:
As I start to descend (a different route down), we see the only unit that continues to have trouble with fast descents is the COROS Vertix 2S. Other units are spot-on, including the Karoo 3:
Likewise for another bit here:
However, elevation is another story. Right off the bat, you can see the Karoo 3 is hard-wrong here. Despite starting at sea level (literally, getting off a boat in the ocean and starting the ride), it didn’t correctly update elevation.
In fact, it shows as -126m at the start if I look at the Hammerhead post-ride dashboard (on the DCR Analyzer above, we don’t currently show negative elevation, we simply flat-line at 0m):
So, what gives? Was this an elevation failure like seen on the Karoo 2, or something else? I sent it over to Hammerhead, and here’s what they sent back:
“After diving into the ride logs, it looks like elevation calibration didn’t fire until after this ride; it also appears your Karoo was not connected to the Companion App at the time of this ride. Had it been paired to the new Companion App or connected to Wifi, your Karoo would have calibrated elevation before starting the ride. The team dove into the numbers and elevation offset from Amsterdam to the starting location of this ride, and confirmed that the elevation numbers would have been correct if calibration had happened before the ride.
Karoo should fall back on GPS for elevation calibration if a network connection is not available – the team is investigating as to why that did not happen on your Karoo for this ride. We will follow up with findings.”
Indeed, this was the first ride on the island after flying in. Further, the companion app wasn’t opened (as they didn’t have it available till the day after). Of course, as they pointed out, this shouldn’t have been a problem. This should have immediately used GPS for initial calibration, as it did for every other ride.
And that’s the thing: This is the only ride that did this. Every other ride shows proper/correct elevation. I even went back and looked at every ride after I traveled during these two months, to see if the first ride back and failures. None did. Only this single ride was weirdly offset.
In any case, one more ride – this time back in The Netherlands on the lookout for tulips. Oh, I found them:
Here’s the ride overview:
Here’s a boringly perfect section of random roadway:
And another boringly perfect section of random roadway:
And here’s the elevation profile, which again, mind the scale here. These are all very much the same:
And finally, another battery burn chart. This is a 3-hr ride, with mostly map pages up on all these units (except the Epix Pro). I didn’t control for brightness levels here, so my guess is the Edge 840 was on full brightness for this one, hence the higher battery burn. All had power meters and heart rate sensors paired, and the Edge 840 would have also had Connect IQ sensors (CORE) also paired.
Again, a pretty consistent result on the 12-13hrs estimate with the map page, for the Karoo 3.
In any case, looking at GPS accuracy overall, I see only good things on the Karoo 3’s data plots here. There’s absolutely nothing of concern in any of the scenarios I’ve looked at. I have not yet had a chance to go mountain biking with it, just sorta how the travel cookie crumbled. But I’ll do so next week, and will add those data sets in here.
On the elevation side, the data speaks for itself. I had two months of perfect elevation plots, yet a single elevation initial calibration failure (where it simply didn’t set the initial value, everything trended otherwise correctly). You can decide from that what you will.
Product Comparison:
Now, I’ve got a very stupid-deep comparison video/post coming up either Friday morning between the three leading units in this market: Garmin Edge 840, Hammerhead Karoo 3, and Wahoo ROAM V2. Virtually every one of my rides to date has had all three units side-by-side, so I’ve got tons of both technical data, but more importantly observational data comparing them.
And the competition has arguably never been better between these three. Each has their own strengths in different categories – from battery life, to simplicity, to depth of features/integration, and countless more categories. I’ve divided up that video/post into a number of categories, so you can figure out which pieces are most interesting to you.
Again, stay tuned for that for Friday morning!
Wrap-Up:
The new Karoo isn’t a revolutionary upgrade, but, it doesn’t have to be. There’s no company in the sports tech space that has as many upgrades/updates to their device as Hammerhead has. It updates with new features roughly every two weeks, and has been doing so for years. Most of those new features are minor, but every few months you’ll get some big ticket items. The thing is, they don’t all have to be massive new features. That’s fundamentally what’s made their chief competitor, Garmin, the leader in many outdoor watch/cycling markets: Victory by a thousand cuts (features).
Thus it’d be easy to look at the Karoo 3 and see only modest upgrades in hardware compared to the Karoo 2. Sure, each of the upgrades is appreciated, but no singular new thing on the Karoo 3 individually screams ‘buy me now’. Instead, it’s the knowledge that the Karoo 3 takes aim at the chief hardware annoyances of the Karoo 2, and addressed them. Likewise, it’s the knowledge that the Karoo 3 is the new ‘baseline’ hardware for which updates will come. Hammerhead says that while the Karoo 2 will continue to get updates, there will be cases where the Karoo 2 won’t get new features the Karoo 3 has (such as the companion app, or some of the new UI features, etc…). That gap will only widen over team.
Not that it matters a ton, you can’t buy a Karoo 2 if you tried (it’s been out of stock almost everywhere for months). Hammerhead stopped making them last summer, and has been building and stockpiling Karoo 3 units since before Christmas (yes, 6 months ago).
Where Hammerhead needs to focus their attention now is building up that companion app to Wahoo-like levels for lots of secondary tasks, as well as improving their structured workout player. I’d also like to see them really spend some legit time on performance/speed enhancements. With all the new hardware gains (processor/RAM), this thing should be massively faster than the Karoo 2, and it’s at best a fraction of a second faster (at best). Seriously Hammerhead, spend real dev time on this.
But at this juncture, Hammerhead has managed to become one of the few competitor brands to Garmin to actually make it over the hump from ‘cute startup’ to a very legit competitor and a product that I’d be happy to ride with as my regular bike computer. As always, I look forward to whatever new set of feature updates comes every two weeks.
With that – thanks for reading!