Holux TwoNav Sportiva Plus review

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.