Holux TwoNav Sportiva Plus review

The Sportiva Plus is a satnav for outdoor enthusiasts, rather than in-car use. Despite being billed as a cycling satnav, it comes with topographical maps for the UK. That’s fine if you plan to do most of your riding off-road, but you’ll want to add the optional UK & Ireland road maps (V-map) for 29 Euros (approximately £25) for road cycling.

The kit includes a chunky bike mount, a heart rate monitor and a speed/cadence sensor. Installing the system on a mountain bike was easy thanks to the use of cable ties – pull them tight and snip off the excess. The speed/cadence sensor mounts on the rear chainstay, but only one magnet is supplied so you have to choose whether to mount it on your pedal – for cadence – or a spoke, for speed. Unless you want to purchase an extra speed/cadence sensor to cater for both measurements, it’s best to use it as a cadence sensor, and let the GPS receiver calculate current speed.

The Sportiva’s green and white finish might not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s a rugged device rubber covers over the mini USB port to make it showerproof. It takes standard Nokia batteries, so additional packs are cheap and widely available. Battery life is around six hours with the screen on, and up to 20 hours with the screen off and recording your movements. Under the battery is a microSD slot which accepts up to 32GB cards. It has a three-axis digital compass and barometric altitude measurement (which you can opt to use instead of the GPS reading).

As you’d expect from an outdoor satnav, the Sportiva Plus supports waypoints, routes and tracks, but it can also calculate a route to a destination on-road when using the V-map. With the latter, you can navigate to a destination by postcode, address, point of interest, point on the map and co-ordinates. Custom POIs are supported.

The menu system is complex, so you’ll need the user manual to begin with. There are handy contextual menus which pop up when you press the menu button on the side of the device. Our main gripe is that the interface is designed to be used with a stylus, so zooming in and out of maps is tricky with a chubby fingertip. You can tap and drag to scroll through menus, but this is unreliable on the resistive screen. Another problem is that the menu automatically exits after you change certain settings, forcing you to retrace your steps to make another change.

We were slightly disappointed with the quality of the screen. Despite being transflective, it wasn’t easily visible in bright sunlight with the backlight off. Setting the screen brightness to 100 per cent helped, but this drains the battery far quicker. The 240×400 resolution is high enough for the 3in screen, but it’s surprisingly grainy due to the touchscreen.

Navigating using the autorouting function was easy – but make sure you select bicycle rather than car or pedestrian first. The display is much like that of a conventional satnav, but instead of spoken instructions, you get a warning beep as you approach a turn. There’s a symbol to indicate the next turn, a speed limit sign for the current road and a pop-out bar showing time to distance, current speed, current time and elapsed distance. More data is available by pressing the context button. You can toggle between two screens, one showing heart rate, cadence and other trip information, and the other showing an elevation graph and digital compass.

When following a pre-determined track or route, you can set alarms to alert you when going off route. You can also customise the track colour and thickness to help make it as clear as possible. The Sportiva can open TRK, GPX, IGC and PLT formats, plus RTE and GPX for routes. Via the status menu, you can tap the record button to save your travelled route, whether you’re following a route or not.

You can plan routes, waypoints and track on the device, but this is very fiddly due to the small screen. Unfortunately, despite the high price, you only get the basic version of the ‘Land’ software. This cut-down version can’t view maps in 3D and doesn’t allow you to create or modify tracks. It does, however, allow you to upload new maps and routes and view graphs and information about your routes. We recommend using www.gpsies.com for creating routes, since it allows you to choose between various maps including Google and OpenCycleMap.

The Sportiva Plus is a capable device, but it isn’t as good as the Garmin Edge 800. It costs £25 less with road maps, yet comes with a combined speed and cadence sensor, has a better screen and better software. We also like Garmin’s Connect website where you can upload your track logs and easily share your achievements with friends. If you want a device for hiking and cycling, the Sportiva Plus is slightly cheaper (the Edge 800’s Ordnance Survey mapping is expensive), but we’d still buy the Garmin.