I find that the battery on phones is way worse than a dedicated unit. My phone can do 3-4 hours of navigation before the battery starts to get worryingly low. My Lezyne Mega XL that I paid ~£50 for manages something like 30 hours.

I was going to replace my old bike computer (which got stolen) with a new Garmin, but ultimately decided against it.

I instead got a waterproof bike mount for my phone and use Osmand to track my rides (there's tons of other more user-friendly apps to use). Battery life is nowhere near as good as my old bike computer which used to last several days on a single charge - my phone goes down by around 10% for each hour of riding with the screen on, and in hot weather it shows an overheating warning (refuses to charge for a while after).

I don't think I'd go out of my way to get another bike computer though, perfectly fine with using my phone. I planned to use an old rugged phone instead of my current one... but ended up bricking it 😳😅

I was going to just say an old android phone, too. It has all the computing power of any garmin, a gps that's probably good enough, a huge app catalogue, can be super cheap, and you don't have to deal with whatever crappy ui garmin designs. I guess it all depends on use case...

That’s definitely Garmin for you. I’ve had forerunners and edge computers since fr205. Good hardware but shitty software. Still, I’ve tried others like wahoo and always ended up with Garmin again. Currently on an edge 1040 and a fr965, 15 years later and I still get lost in the menus.

Went with the Wahoo at the end and couldn't be happier. Everything seems to work great including navigation and connection with my hr monitor. Integration with Connect is also super easy, Wahoo automatically uploads the ride to dropbox from where I can upload it to Connect.