Wahoo Rival gets maps…kinda

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.