Bryton 420 bike computer

Recreation Cycling
1

After watching a bunch of Youtube videos extolling its virtues and reading a lot of online reviews, I got the Bryton Rider 420 bike computer as a budget alternative to the much more expensive Garmin computers.
I wanted it for navigation - I currently use Komoot with bone conduction headphones for voice directions while I explore hills and country roads near Taipei, but sometimes it’s not immediately clear exactly where I should go, and I hoped the Bryton, by providing a clear visual indicator of direction, would mean I had to spend less time stopping to take out my phone and check Komoot’s map.

However…over the first several cycling trips with the Bryton, it’s provided navigation only intermittently. It even seems to redraw routes created in Komoot.

At first, the routing seems really accurate, but then diverges further and further from reality. After that the navigation screen is blank of anything for much of the time, save an arrow pointing at nothing. Every now and then, the route reappears on the screen, and slowly moves back towards the arrow until I’m apparently following it again…except I’m already following it, via Komoot, which is proving itself nearly flawless in comparison.

On my most recent trip, up to Maokong Gondola Station, I took screenshots of Komoot and also pictures of the bike computer’s screen. The Komoot map is dead-on accurate for my location, but what I see on the computer screen is, more often than not, from some other, parallel dimension.

Anyway - I’m here because I wondered if anyone else using one of these had a better experience than I did, and if I might be doing something wrong.

Komoot is very good for real-world navigation, but I wondered if, when importing a Komoot route into the Bryton app, the resulting route on the computer defaulted to ‘allowed’ routes on Google Maps, which are made for drivers, and not cyclists.

I’m a bit disappointed, because Bryton is a Taiwanese company and I’d thought it would be better. The hardware is fine, even very good, but there’s something missing in how it processes routes and how it follows them - if at all.

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Well, I figured it out, and also figured I might as well put up the solution here in case anyone else has the same problem.

The Bryton syncs directly with third-party services like Strava, MapMyRide and Komoot, but you can also directly upload GPX route files to the computer via the ‘Bryton Active’ app on your phone. Previously, I was relying on synced routes, but these constantly diverged from preplanned routes I’d built in Komoot. Probably because the Bryton uses OpenStreetMap, and where I knew I could go on the bike didn’t match where OpenStreetMap said I could go. I only realised this when I actually checked a synced route on the Bryton app against what I saw in Komoot, and there were sometimes huge differences.

The solution, I’ve found, is to upload a GPX directly to the Bryton. First time I did that, it followed the exact route I’d built with pinpoint accuracy. So I’ll be doing that from now on.

One small drawback, I’ve found, is that you can’t reverse a route in the 420, although I think you can in some of their more expensive machines. If I turn back before I reach the end of a programmed route–say if I’m riding there and back again, and not in a loop–the Bryton starts announces you’re off-route, even if you clearly aren’t. You’re just not going the way it thinks you want to go. That can cause problems if your homeward route doesn’t precisely match your outbound journey–for example, if there’s a one-way street somewhere along your route.

I’m personally of the opinion the Bryton works best in conjunction with a spoken navigation app like Komoot. Occasionally it’s really not obvious which way Komoot wants you to go, and whether a ‘slight right’ means the road to your immediate right, or the one next to that, or even another one, next to that, and still on the right. But if you look at the Bryton, you can get a clearer idea of where you should be going. Sometimes it’s too loud in traffic to hear Komoot clearly, and conversely, sometimes the traffic is too busy for you to take even a fraction of a second to look at a bike computer, in which case, you need Komoot.

Now it’s working the way I want it to, mostly, the Bryton is actually pretty great. Not perfect, but pretty great.

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