Wahoo Launches Multisport Watch – ELEMNT RIVAL

Rumors of a watch from Wahoo have been floating around for years, but it’s now time for the ELEMNT RIVAL to be unvailed. Runners, triathletes, and cyclists looking for a wrist-based computer, now have an option from the easy to use ELEMNT platform.

The ELEMNT RIVAL looks fairly standard on the outside. It features a round face with a 64 color, 240×240 pixel screen protected by Gorilla Glass. The ceramic bezel is available in white and a stealth grey with replaceable bands and standard buckles. It has the standard features that you’d look for in a sports watch, like a barometric altimeter, Livetrack, notifications from your phone, and is waterproof down to 5ATM, but also controls your KICKR and tracks your swimming and running metrics (TICKRX needed for some running metrics. It connects by ANT+ and Bluetooth to power meters, speed/cadence sensors, and heart rate monitors, while also having a built-in wrist-based heart rate monitor that can broadcast your HR to other devices. Battery life is claimed at 14 days in smartwatch mode or 24 hours in GPS mode. Charging happens through a proprietary cable, which is a little disappointing to have another cable to carry but is pretty standard for sports watches.

On the sides of the bezel, the ELEMNT RIVAL uses five buttons in total, reminiscent of a chronograph watch. These buttons control anything from starting and stopping activities, zooming in and out, scrolling data pages, controlling backlight and notifications, and more.

Like other Wahoo ELEMNT products, the RIVAL connects to the Companion app on your phone. This allows you to initially connect and set up your watch, update firmware, change settings, edit and upload workouts to the watch, connect sensors, and upload your workouts to authorized apps like Strava. Future firmware updates can possibly add new features.

“The real magic of RIVAL is that we were able to take everything we have done with the ELEMNT bike computer and create a perfect parallel, giving triathletes and runners the same ease of use that cyclists have had access to since 2016,” said Chip Hawkins, founder of Wahoo. “A key design concern was making a watch with looks to match its performance. This is a stylish, high-performance multi-sport watch that should be the choice of any athlete looking for a lightweight GPS watch with an unbelievable battery life to track the longest races.”

Two of the biggest features are Touchless Transition and Multisport Handover, both of which are new features to the market and allow athletes to concentrate on their workout or race, not their devices.

Touchless Transition is a feature that moves with you from swim to bike to run. While in triathlon mode, the ELEMNT RIVAL will detect a change in activity and automatically track each activity, along with your transition times. It is all based on your speed and the motion of your wrist. You can still manually mark the end of your activities through transition, even while using Touchless Transition.

Multisport Handover allows the ELEMNT RIVAL to use an ELEMNT, BOLT, or ROAM head unit as a second display, keeping data front and center during your ride. With your ELEMNT bike computer in Multisport mode, you’ll start the Triathlon activity on the RIVAL, and when the two are close enough, they will connect and the ELEMNT head unit will display data. The data continues to be recorded on the RIVAL throughout the bike activity and will transition smoothly to your run after you leave the bike.

The ELEMNT RIVAL also features Perfect View Zoom. This allows you to focus on the data that is important to you. When setting up your data pages, you can add up to 6 fields. When working out, you can zoom in to the most important data for you, or zoom back out to 2, 3, 4, or all 6 of the data fields.

For swimmers, the ELEMNT RIVAL provides swim metrics like lengths, distance, pace, stroke count, stroke rate, and calories. It also allows you to customize the pool size and has pool lap recognition, again, allowing you to focus on your workout and not your technology.

When not working out, the ELEMNT RIVAL still moves with you throughout your day. You can customize the face with accent colors, widgets, notification badges, and you can customize how you see the time and date. For widgets, you can view three per page, or cycle through more using the Perfect View Zoom. Widgets include things like battery status, 24/7 heart rate, daily activity calories, steps, world clock, and various weekly goals for workouts, swim, cycling, and running.

At $379, the ELEMNT RIVAL is pretty competitively priced in the multisport market. Garmin’s 745 starts at $499 and the Polar Grit X comes in at $429. Only Coros comes in lower with their $299 Apex, a powerhouse in its own right that we have previously reviewed.

The sports watch market is already a crowded arena, but the ELEMNT RIVAL looks to be a solid contender, especially for those in the Wahoo ecosystem. It checks all of the boxes of what you’d look for in a multisport watch, and adds some new features that other brands will scramble to catch up to. If the RIVAL is as easy to use as the ELEMNT and ROAM, it will be a hit. We have a ROAM in for review at the moment, and if we can get a RIVAL in as well, we’ll get our initial feelings posted, followed by a full review.

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