My other half is what you'd call a keen cyclist - he cycles about 25 miles a day commuting to work, and frequently goes on weekend training rides too. He's got a couple of cycle computers that show things like the time, distance, speed, and similar, but had been hankering after a Garmin cycle computer to replace them ever since he found out about them! Finally, he took the plunge and shelled out £250 on the Garmin Edge 305 with cadence and heart rate monitor (cadence is RPM for your feet while pedalling, by the way).

Anyway, he's used it pretty much every day since it got here, including 3 separate loops of his "weekend" 8.5 mile local hilly loop. Once you've ridden a particular course once, you can set the Edge to ride the same loop against yourself using your completed course time as a target. It's motivating to ride against yourself, and you can either have a ride profile view showing a black blob for your position and a grey blob for your "opponent", a map of the route showing your position and your opponent's, or a data readout giving you the distance you are ahead or behind yourself. I went out for a short ride with him, and spent the ride home being told how much behind or ahead we were of the out-going ride...so I suppose it could get annoying!

There's a route planning tool that you can use on the computer too - Neil used it to plan our joint ride out to the library about 1.5 miles away (even though we both knew the way perfectly well already). The route wasn't planned using the software that came with the gadget, but using another programme (available here, if you're interested: http://www.bradculberson.com/cc/map.html) with more accurate mapping information - this uses Google Maps, a lot more detailed than the standard Garmin map included with the package, which only seems to feature major roads.

The elevation info makes cycling almost like a video game, and you end up racing against your former self as a little grey blob on the screen. Although I'm not sure whether I personally would like it (I'd be falling behind myself far too often for comfort), Neil uses it regularly to compare rides. For example he recently ditched his pannier for a day, and discovered that his ride to work was about 6 minutes quicker as a result. So now he's making a definite effort to leave his pannier at home when possible, and seeing an increase in average speed and getting home that little bit earlier of an evening.

For times, you can have the total ride time, the current lap time, the time for your previous lap, the average lap time for this ride, the time you've been stationary and of course the current time of day. You can also have the sunrise and sunset times at your present location, if you want them.

Probably the most useful feature is the PC software that goes with the computer itself - Training Center. Neil is generally hopeless at recording and documenting data about his rides (and would freely admit this himself, promise!), even though he likes to look through data that's been collected and organised. Training Center tracks every bit of information about every ride, and files it all away neatly. It's then easy to come back and review progress, compare one ride against another, see whether you've become fitter or faster over the last few weeks or months, and so on. As an example of how the Garmin tracks what you've been doing, I can tell you that since getting this gadget, Neil has cycled for 238.17 miles, burning 17,591 calories along the way - climbing 9,241 feet during the rides and reaching a maximum speed of 38.1 miles per hour (I just hope there were no speed cameras nearby...).

It also has Smart Recording, where it works out for itself when a trackpoint needs to be recorded and in practice that tends to be about every 5 seconds, so about 17 hours of recording. Garmin recommend using Smart Recording, and personally I'm not sure what the benefits of Per Second recording would be. When the memory is full, it automatically overwrites the oldest data, so you do have to download it to your computer fairly frequently.

The only downside (other than the MotionBased issue above) that I've heard Neil mention so far is to do with the cadence sensor that he got. It needs to have a little magnet attached to the crank, near the left pedal. The magnet is sticky backed and attaches with a cable tie too, to secure it. However after only a couple of rides, the sensor was almost falling off because it had come loose on the crank. It's now been firmly re-attached by means of superglue, which seems to be working so far, but it's definitely worth keeping a close eye on if you get one of these things. However this isn't unique to the Garmin cadence sensor - because cranks taper, all cadence sensors seem to have the same issue.

Anyway, Neil certainly seems very happy with the Edge 305, and he's definitely pleased with how it's worked so far. It's a tad pricey at £250, but then he's not been buying travelcards to get into work for a couple of years now, and those savings soon add up (so far they've added up to a brand new bike, panniers, millions of cycling jerseys and shorts, SPDs and shoes, and so on, but that's another story!).

Other information:
There is a smaller brother to the Edge 305, which is the Edge 205. It doesn't support heart rate and cadence sensors, and has GPS altitude rather than barometric (so is less accurate when calculating hills), but is also about £100 cheaper than the 305.