Product Review: The Annoying New Cateye Stealth 10

Cateye is known for their small and reliable electric cycling gadgets. I have a Cateye light that I've been using for six years and it still brightens the road as well now as it did the first day. I've used Cateye Strada Speed and Cadence computers for years and have had no problems as well.

But the New Cateye Stealth GPS enabled computer is absolute garbage. 

Lets start with some background. The new Cateye Stealth comes in two versions: the CC-GL10 and the CC-GL50. Don't ask me what those letters and numbers mean, I don't know. But I have a theory that it stands for "Crappy Crap- Good Luck! 10 minutes spent product testing or 50 minutes spend product testing".  Both models keep track of time, speed, distance, and can theoretically transfer this information to your computer and then the internet via platforms like Strava or Cateye's proprietary "Cateye Atlas" program. The difference between them is that the CC-GL50 is Ant+ enabled so it can connect to your power meter and heart rate monitor. 

On paper, the CC-GL50 seems pretty good. It can do everything the Garmin 510 can do, but it's smaller, lighter, and about $250 less expensive. I bought the CC-GL10 because I don't have a power meter and I don't care how fast my heart is beating, just as long as it doesn't stop. 

Problem one: Unlike the Garmin products which can link to an external speed and cadence sensor, the Cateye Stealths are entirely dependent on GPS satellite tracking to determine speed. (Correction, a reader pointed out that there is a cadence/speed device for the Stealth 50, but not the Stealth 10, but it costs $60) This means that the computer is useless whenever you're in a tunnel, or in dense building coverage, or in the rain. Also, it takes a while for it to find a satellite. Today I rode for nearly ten minutes before my computer found a signal and started working. (Correction, Cateye uses advanced tracking software similar to Garmin that plots where you probably are when a satellite can't track you. However, even on a good day it can take quite a while for the device to find a satellite, and you can't be moving while it's looking. On one cloudy day I managed to do a whole two hour ride without the device finding a satellite. I warrantied that computer, but the Stealth 50 they gave me as a replacement isn't much better. If you live somewhere with dense building coverage, forget it.) 

Problem Two: The instructions make no sense. Granted it was translated from Japanese fairly recently for the American market, but there are a lot of gaps in that translation. The entire instruction booklet for this fairly complicated device is a dual-sided fold-out with color pictures but very few words to explain what the heiroglyphs mean. You can go online to download a complete instruction booklet in solid English, but seriously, what a pain in the ass. 

Problem Three: In order to really get any good use out of the device you have to first become a member of Cateye Atlas, which -as of this writing- is mostly in Japanese, and through them join Cateye Sync, which also requires downloading Adobe AIR to work properly. There're no real prompts on how to do any of this, you just have to click around until you figure it out and read the online instructions very carefully for hints. (Well there are a few tabs that say "Download Cateye Sync" but once you do that you are taken to a screen where you have to first drag a icon into another icon and then double click on something else... I don't remember, but the first time I tried downloading Sync I did the steps in the wrong order and screwed it up. Which took a while to figure out and was a big waste of time. Also, even after you download Sync and log a few rides the site still prompts you to download sync with a little tab off to the right. I've downloaded it already! Leave me alone!)

Problem Four: This is the main problem, Cateye Sync doesn't work. I have reloaded and rebooted the damn app half a hundred times, gone through the FAQs, sent a message to Cateye HQ, and still gotten nowhere. You plug your computer in, click "Download Data", it gives you a load screen for a few seconds and then tells you, "No data is available". Bullshit! I'm looking at my CC-GL10 right now and I see right on the screen everything about the ride I just went on! (minus the ten minutes before it found the satellite of course) (After talking with a Cateye rep I learned that I had to hold the big space bar on the front of the gadget for a few seconds, as some of the people in the comment section pointed out. Doing this feels a little like erasing the data because that's what you do on the Strada series.)

Now that I've figured the thing out, I have one more problem. Sometimes it just stops mapping, but doesn't tell me. It's always at the same spot, under the overpass on Lakeshore Drive, near Oprah's condo. I once rode 60 miles, as the computer told me, but when I plugged the thing in to my PC the map cut off when I hit the overpass. This has happened 8 times over several weeks. (Update, after 2 years I still have this problem. There were a few times while touring in Iowa that it cut out too)

I get it, the Stealth Computers are brand new to America, there are going to be some kinks. But this seems like a rather glaring oversight! What good is this fancy GPS computer if you can't download your data onto Strava and gloat to your friends that you have a fancy GPS computer!

I say if you want a quality GPS cycling computer, just pony up for a Garmin. If you don't need any of that GPS crap, and trust me you don't, just get a regular Strada and be done with it.

Also, the "upload to Strava" link on the Cateye Sync app is a good touch, but you can only load one ride at a time and it takes a while for the ride to show up on the Strava dashboard, unlike my Android phone that shows its uploads instantly. There's another bug that has only happened to me once so far where I loaded a single ride but it showed up on Stava as if I loaded two tandem rides. Don't know who's to blame here but it's worth mentioning.

After using the Stealth 10 for three weeks now I've come to the conclusion that if all you want to do is Strava Challenges and GPS, get the Garmin Edge 200. It's $130 and does all the same stuff as the Cateye but better.  If you want a speed and cadence sensor, you have to get the Edge 500 kit from Garmin, which is about $100 more than the Cateye GL50 complete kit, but you get what you pay for.