Stages Cycling

Dash L200 GPS Bike Computer

Underappreciated greatness

Familiarity:

I've put it through the wringer

I've had a lot of bike computers over the years and have gotten pretty picky. I think the L200 is one of the best computers our there right now but I should first qualify that statement. I ride 5x/week and always use a computer, but 99% of this use is for training and recording of metrics. I rarely use navigation features. Touchscreens on my phone, laptop, tablet, car: yes please. Bike computer: definitely no. Accompanying app for setup is a must. WiFi, bluetooth, Ant+ and onboard GPS are also must-haves. Standardized mounts, either wahoo or garmin quarter-turn style. Proprietary nonsense is for seatposts and bottom brackets. Ok, my pickiness out of the way. I'll just list out what I like about the L200: It does all the basic blocking and tackling that I think anyone expects from a good bike computer these days: records ride data with lots of sensor integrations, has comprehensive navigation capabilities, has hill-climb features, Strava segment and route integrations, good companion app, etc... Full color screen with well designed and flexible layout options. Very nice visible colors and the ability to swtich from light to dark theme (I find dark hard to see in daylight). Can go portrait or landscape. I didn't expect to care about this, but turns out I like landscape on the MTB. Portrait for road. Graphical data widgets are very well thought out. These widgets combine 3 or 4 different data fields so that with a quick glance you can get what you need for power-based and HR based training. Excellent for interval training and racing. Lots of settings to control. If you have very specific metrics you want/like to see, they're probably available. App is easy to use and you can get everything dialed in without needing to mess around on the computer itself. Auto-lap feature can be set to GPS based trigger, not just time or distance. Anyone ride/race laps on a circuit? Velodrome? Hill repeats? You will appreciate this. I still have a hard time understanding how a huge major player in this bike computer space does not have this feature. Shortcuts menu. This is great for those features you need to get to regularly while out on a ride (auto-lap change, PM zero offset, etc...). No more navigating a byzantine UI to change something on the fly that you access regularly. I only have a couple of gripes: Integration with Di2 is not (yet) functional. You can see a sensor pairing place-holder for it in the software but its not functional. Coming in the next couple months is what I hear? Buttons don't feel as snappy/clicky/tactile as I prefer. Lastly, Stages is very responsive if you have questions/issues. I got my one issue sorted within 2 hours: very fast effective communication. I think this computer is one of the best out there if you've got priorities similar to mine. I applaud Stages for putting together this hardware/software and I think if people didn't feel so shackled to competitor eco-systems they'd more readily abandon those inferior head units for this. Yeah, I said it: inferior. If you're fed up with mystery crashes, lost ride data, lack of features, boring UI, expensive, etc.... You really should give the Stages computer a try. I rolled the dice on it a while back and am very glad I did.