Between 2011 July and 2011 September, my partner and I did a 3 300km bicycle tour of southern France. The below is a review of a product that we used during that tour.
It was good to have the time readily available and fun to have our top speed and to be able to track our daily distance. As suggested by others, we used the computers as a navigation tool. But then it rained and they began to work only intermittently. Then they finally stopped working altogether. We sent them back to the US in the hopes that they would dry out and be usable by the time we returned. One recovered and one did not. A non-weather-resistant bicycle computer isn't much use, though, so I put the one that recovered on the bicycle of a fair-weather cyclist who won't face this limitation.
When the computers stopped working, I was concerned that we would have difficulty with navigation but the French, no doubt following the example of the Romans (whose distance markers still stand here and there along the roads), have a thorough route infrastructure. With the exception of C roads (uncommon) and Z roads (rare), nearly every kilometer of every road we traveled on was marked in some recognizable fashion. Some included a smorgasborg of information (the basics + elevation, percent grade, distance to next town, distance from last town), others were simply a white number on the road. Even in barest form, these markers were more useful as navigation guides than our computers had been.
Once we decided to dismount the computers, we got to each lose a free 37g off of our bikes with no loss in functionality. Bravo!
