It’s perhaps not the most exciting news you’ll hear today but the announcement that Wahoo Rival now supports maps shows the commitment of Wahoo to continually move their wrist-based offering toward better things.
It’s not really a map though. At least not yet. Rather than a map, we should more correctly call it a breadcrumb trail; a simple GPS plot of where you’ve been in your current workout. (Wahoo does refer to it as a map, below). The feature doesn’t even have the ability to zoom
What this means
I’d heard this feature rumoured (@Ja) many months ago and expected something a little meatier than this to be released. Anyway, here it is. And it is definitely a step toward Wahoo offering more extensive functionality to include things like this
- retrace a route step by step or as the crow flies
- load a route
- navigate to a waypoint or point on the route (start, end, midpoint)
That’s the feature set that other companies addressed years ago but the step up from there to full map intelligence on the watch is a big one and the current Rival watch simply isn’t capable of doing that and doesn’t have a magnetic compass or sufficient memory.
Judging by the scope of this ‘map’ feature Wahoo is clearly a LONG way from intelligent navigation on a wristwatch if, indeed, they ever even plan to do that. A consequence is that even if Wahoo released a Wahoo Rival 2 tomorrow it simply wouldn’t have full-blown maps on it, the software isn’t there yet.
Last Updated on 26 January 2026 by the5krunner
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tfk is the founder and author of the5krunner, an independent endurance sports technology publication. With 20 years of hands-on testing of GPS watches and wearables, and competing in triathlons at an international age-group level, tfk provides in-depth expert analysis of fitness technology for serious athletes and endurance sport competitors. ID
This sounds a bit negative.
Sure they’re still far behind most of the competition (the closest I see is the Pace 2, cheaper…each has its pros and cons).
And it looks like a half-baked thing as of today. More like a placeholder.
I imagine that to perform this, the watch reads the Fit/gpx data it stored since activity start…I could not be much more difficult to read an existing GPX file on the watch and display it on this grid…and voilà, you have route navigation (not full routable maps like only Garmin has…which takes way more work/CPU/manpower/memory on watch….
I like that, as Suunto, they make their relatively old watch evolve.
my assumption would be that any code base for RIVAL would be the starting point for whatever comes next on any new watch.
Yeah, I hope that they’re not working for nothing 😀
Seeing how it works on their bike computers with quite close features sets, we can hope for something similar here.
Despite some annoyances, I still really like my Rival.
Rival 2 for tomorrow ?
Roam 2 you should saying…
Here he comes !!
😁