Since it’s still relatively new (i.e., it was announced ages ago but it recently started actually shipping finally) and I couldn’t find a ton of data on it yet from other folks who have gotten their hands on it, I’m going to write up what I’ve noticed so far hoping it helps someone out who’s deciding on whether to pick this one up or not.

The good:

• The screen is large and very easy to read. You can have up to 8 different data points on any of the three “pages” available to you.
• USB port is on the device itself. No need for a cradle like the Forerunner did.
• Elevation detection is way better than the Forerunner. For example, it wasn’t uncommon for me to ascend 300-400 ft while on a *trainer* in my garage when using my Forerunner. The Edge 500 reports a nice comforting zero every time so far.
• The calories burned reported by the device are a lot more realistic than the Forerunner. Since it uses your heart rate (and maybe some other data) to calculate the calories burned, it’s clearly going to report much more accurate numbers.
• There’s a “Start Notice” feature that does a decent job of alerting you that you’ve started moving and you haven’t pressed “Start” yet. I know that’s happened to me many times in the past and this will surely help me out.
• The way it attaches to your bike’s stem seems more reliable than the mount they offer to hook up a Forerunner to a bike with. I’ve seen the Forerunner fall off those mounts but the twist-mechanism used for the Edge seems pretty secure.
• It’s got a thermometer that now uploads the temperature for each ride to Garmin Connect. I don’t think it’s accurate–it’s always a bit high–but it might be helpful to just compare the deltas from ride to ride.
• It also seems to have more stats like “Grade %” that I don’t remember seeing on the Forerunner.

The bad (all pretty minor–so far):

• The USB port is protected by a small rubber cover that isn’t all that easy to seal shut. Not a huge problem but still a little tedious.
• The Start/Stop and Lap buttons are a little harder to press while riding as they’re on the side of the device. I thought the Forerunner’s buttons were better positioned.
• The calories burned are more accurate than the Forerunner. While this is obviously good there was something extra encouraging about being lied to by the Forerunner’s ridiculously high numbers. :)

Update (12/19/2009): Looks like there’s an updated ROM for the Edge 500 that fixes a few things I hadn’t run into until today. You can get the update from here.

The Windows Live Search gadget by default is a general search utility but it has a few options that allow you to configure it as a search engine for a specific site only. An example use of that would be to configure it to only search MSDN for information for a developer.

The traffic gadget supports many major cities, is scrollable by dragging (much better than the traffic gadget I used to use), and is well integrated with maps.live.com.

Check them out if you’re using Vista. Chances are you’ll want to keep them.

Robert mentions “at this rate I’m going to need sidebars running on both sides of my screen…” I’m guessing Robert is aware of this but I’ve encountered several folks who were surprised to see a bunch of Gadgets spread out across my desktop. It turns out you can “detach” Gadgets from the Sidebar and place them anywhere on your desktop. The other little known feature (at least from what I’ve experienced) is how the Start+Spacebar shortcut bring all your Gadgets on top of all other windows. This is pretty handy when using a bunch of detached Gadgets.