When I bought my roadie, I was faced with the question of which cycling computer to buy. I had decided that I wanted to take training a bit more seriously and wanted a heart rate monitor, and I wanted something to measure cadence.

After looking around at a bunch of options, the Polar CS200 CAD seemed to fit all my criteria, so I started poking around the place for some online reviews. Here I met a big issue, the quality of review data for cycling stuff online is really poor. If you do a search for "<productname> review", you get hundreds of results for online shops with "be the first to review x". So onto the various forums I went.

In the forums, you'll find a lot of bad stories about this particular gadget, for every thread about it, you'll find a couple of people who seemed to have lots of problems, usually ending with them returning the unit. This was pretty disconcerting, but I got thinking about a couple of points.

It's pretty well accepted that people that are satisfied with a product are less likely to be vocal about it than the people that are dissatisfied. So, people who bought it, and have had it work fine without any issues are likely to be just out using it, not whining on a forum.

Secondly, if you think about the ratio of smart people to total nuffies you meet on any given day, you gotta figure that a bunch of the people whining, no matter how convincing they sound, were just doing something dumb. The louder they scream about doing everything right, the more likely it is that they had the cadence sensor on the rear derailer, and the HR strap around their head.

Lastly, Polar obviously sell a crapload of these, and if there were that many problems, it wouldn't be worth selling.

Anyway, enough of the background info.... I bought it, and have been riding with it for 5 months.

My concerns seem to have been unwarranted, it works great. I suspect a lot of people might be messing up the installation, I got mine installed at the shop when I bought the bike, as I wanted to rule that possible issue out.

The main worry with wireless computers is dropouts and interference. So far I haven't seen any crazy numbers come up, except for the night the chest strap was in my backpack picking who knows what. The figures always seem reasonable at the end of a ride. As for dropouts, I had a very short one while crossing the Harbour Bridge, where I'd been told that nothing will work at all. I also had a minor dropout during the Spring Cycle, while near an apartment block in Rhodes, not sure what that was about. I've ridden with this in heat, cold, rain, mass rides and fast group bunches, so I've covered off most of the riding conditions except actual racing. So far so good.

The unit itself is well made, smaller than it looks in a lot of photos, and a nice shape and design. The screen is easy to read, and has backlighting for nighttime riding (not that I've ever used that).

While riding, you can rotate the display through a number of different modes which display different datapoints on the screen at once. I leave mine on the standard one which shows Speed and Heart Rate on the large areas, cadence in a smaller one, and distance at  the top. Some of the other stats you can show in different modes include average speed, ride time / stopwatch and lap time.

The computer stores up to 7 "sessions", which is good if you log all your data somewhere, but want to get out for another ride before you've found the time to transfer it. While not in riding mode, you can open up any of these files and review all the summary data like ride time, Average and Max speed, Heart Rate and Cadence, time in the preset HR zone and calories burned. The HR zone feature is a little limited, it allows you to set a maximum and minimum heart rate, and shows you time in zone, time above the zone, and time below the zone. This isn't bad, but most modern heart rate training methods work of 5 zones which is a feature included in the higher model Polar units.

Transferring the data is a little tedious, and this is one of my annoyances with Polar. The unit allows you to transfer data via their SonicLink technology, which means that your PC records the beeps and squeaks output by the unit's speaker, and sends this to the polar training website. This website is a Flash based application, and one of the most annoying and counter intuitive applications I've seen. Although it would be simple, Polar haven't included a way to store the raw data on your PC. They have this technology available, as you can do it if you pony up the $800 for their higher models which use the exact same method, so it's just a marketing decision not to include it. Like I said, it's annoying, but I knew about it beforehand, so I can't complain too much. Instead I manually copy the data into the very excellent CycliStats and store it all there.

Another minor gripe is that it can take a few seconds to update it's data display if you make a major change in something, for example going from coasting to pedalling quickly will not show on the cadence display for a few seconds. It makes sense why this is happening, they are doing an average over a couple of seconds to give you a more accurate picture of what you are really doing, so there really isn't a good way around that one. It's not a big deal and I can live with it.

All in all, the CS200 is a great unit with a good set of features. It's well made, looks cool, seems tough, and has been very reliable. The cadence and speed sensors don't get in the way or look ridiculous and the stem mount makes it easy to remove and insert the head unit. As I mentioned, there are a couple of minor annoyances, but nothing I can't live with.

Some other options I looked at were the CatEye range. Their double wireless looked great, but didn't have the heart rate monitor, and their heart rate model didn't have cadence sensor. Similarly, the Vetta range had some models with some great features, but no model I could find had all the options. Lastly was the new Garmin Edge. Bike computer, Heart Rate, Cadence and GPS. Pure geek fun. Unfortunately it seemed like they were having lots of teething problems. In the first 3 months there were a pile of new firmware versions, each one fixing some bugs and re-introducing some old ones. Garmin are going to be the company to watch in this space, once they get the issues sorted out, and can get some better battery life they will have a hell of a product.

Finally, if you're soon to be in the market for something like this, keep an eye out for the new CS 400, which looks a bit cooler and adds an altimeter.