While we’re all looking over here at the big, bulky, ruggedized mounts that let us carry our iPhones on our bike handlebars, over there in Austria they’re making a minimal mount that you can leave on the bike or carry in your pocket. It’s called the Finn, and according to at least two of my German friends, it’s excellent.
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Ever tried using an iPhone or Android phone to navigate with GPS through crowded streets? It’s pretty difficult, even for a veteran cyclist like me, to split my focus between the road and tiny symbols on the phone’s tiny screen.
Plugging in to a headset to hear turn-by-turn directions sometimes works, but cycling with headphones can also be a pain (not to mention illegal in places under certain conditions).
The answer, of course, is a heads-up display like Google Glass; but until it’s ready, there’s the Hammerhead, a light-powered navigation aid with some other cool tricks up its sleeve.
UPDATE [We said the case is available for the iPhone 5, which it isn’t.]
BikeConsole addresses the single biggest problem with using your iPhone as your in-bike computer: battery life. The iPhone clearly makes for an awesome brain for your bike, with maps, GPS and all manner of bike and fitness apps available, but leaving it running up there with the GPS and screen burning is a great way to kill your battery, fast.
So the BikeConsole does the obvious thing: it adds a battery.
Goal Zero’s new Lighthouse 250 Lantern and USB Power Hub is a camper’s best friend. By day, it’s a USB charger with a backup battery, ready for juicing your waning iPhone. By night, it’s a lamp which will run for up to 48 hours.
Wahoo, known for making sports-tracking accessories that hook up to your iPhone and turn it into a bike/running/fitness computer, has finally made a bike mount for your trusty outboard brain. It’s called the PROTKT, and it puts your iPhone up on your handlebars whilst making sure it stays safe.
Komoot (like commute, only not) is a gem of an app for German bikers and hikers. Or rather, it was: with today’s v5.2 update, the navigation app now comes in English, and adds support for a slew of new countries.
The short form: If you ever take to two wheels, then you need this app.
Spinlister is like Airbnb for bikes. Instead of renting some piece-of-junk city bike for exorbitant rates while you’re on a city vacation, you can instead rent a hipstermobile from a private individual. For—it seems—equally exorbitant rates. And you can of course make some extra cash in your home town renting out your own spare steed.
Here’s a great idea for an iPad accessory – just kidding: it’s terrible! No, just kidding again. The idea is sound, but the implementation doesn’t really get past the lazy-computer-render stage.
It’s called the iBackPack (really) and it’s a way for cyclists to communicate with people behind them.
PowerCycle is a hip-flask-shaped USB battery pack which is designed to be charged by your bike. You’ll need to be running a dynamo hub with an electrical output to actually charge it, so this is more a bike-friendly design than a bike-only one.
I hate the beach: It’s full of dirty sand, sweaty half-naked men and polluted with the sound of bad radio stations. It’s exactly like your average building site in fact, and we don’t go and lie in the sun on those.
But in July in Barcelona, the beach is one of the few places you can go to cool down and feel a breeze. It’s also just about the most dangerous place to take your electronic gadgets.
And that’s where these Cloudcover weatherproof cases come in.
This is the Handleband. It’s a band for your handlebars, but it’s also a great word to roll around your mouth – handleband… handleband – rattling it through your teeth and wrapping it around your tongue. Haaaandlebaaaand.
I know what you bike nuts are thinking. You’re jealous of all the hue-controlled lighting available to the stay-at-home folks, and you want a little bit of that color-changing action for your ride. Well, the folks at Helios have heard you, and are just about to launch a couple of crazy handlebars with built-in LEDs. And that’s not all they do. Oh no…
Bike-On is a turn-by-turn GPS app for cyclists. Unfortunately, like a bike lane that dumps you in the middle of a busy intersection, it is half finished. And to continue the metaphor, you’re probably better off just using a car GPS app.
One of my bikes has a bottle dynamo that presses on the tire and powers the front lamp. The Siva Cycle Atom is a modern-day equivalent, only it won’t rub away your tire or slow you down, and it’ll charge your gadgets instead of just running your lights.
STM has just busted out a whole new range of tech-carrying bags, from small purse-a-likes to hefty schlep-it-all backpacks. But the one I fancy most out of the new lineup is the Velo 2, and not just because it sounds like you’re meant to use it while riding a bike.
Cyclemeter, long my favorite iPhone app for tracking and recording my rides using GPS, has been updated to support the iPad. This makes it — as far as I know anyway — the only app which will natively turn your iPad mini into a dash-mounted in-flight computer for your bike.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – There are many ways that you can annoy pedestrians and motorists with your bike: riding on the sidewalk; ringing the bell constantly as if you were a five-year-old child; running red lights without looking first.
And my favorite: riding a municipal bike-share bike the wrong way down a one-way street, whilst texting (not talking – texting) on a cellphone.
Now, Scosche adds to the long list with a speaker that sits in a bike’s bottle-cage.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – End-of-lifing the Garmin EDGE 500 bike computer is a little like Apple ditching the iPod mini. It’s a classic which would surely keep selling millions for years to come. But the new EDGE 510 is as odd a replacement as the iPod nano, only it’s bigger, not smaller.
Could it be that, after spending a lifetime looking, I have finally found the perfect bag? Of course not. There’s no single bag that can perform every task.
But I might just have found the perfect day-to-day backpack. It’s the medium Velo from Rickshaw Bagworks in San Fransisco, and it’s pretty damn awesome.
If you have been trawling the internet for an iPhone 5 bike mount which looks like it was beamed forward in time from the 1980s, then stop! Your search is over. Better still, the case even has a numeral-heavy 1980s-style name: The M550.
Believe it or not, Black Friday has already come and gone. Pretty soon the Christmas season will begin, and we’ll mark this midwinter festival by getting together with friends and family and continuing to drink and eat far too much.
Meanwhile, we also buy gifts for those same friends and family members, whether they want them or not. Luckily, we’re here to help, and if you follow our festive advice, your gifts just might make it into the “wanted” category.
From now until Christmas, Cult of Mac will be putting together holiday gift guys full of ideas for the special ones in your life, no matter what their interests or your budget. Today, we’re looking at gifts for the good gentleman in your life.
Sometimes, you really need to make an important Skype call when you’re on the go. Or you want to use your bike as a giant (and slightly unwieldy) “tripod” for your camera. At these times, what you need is Photojojo’s Bikepod
Having spent far too much time and money trying to mount an iPad onto the handlebars of my bike, I know all about fastenings both simple and complex. And I also know when to quit with the DIY and just drop some cash.
The Satechi Bikemate Slim 3 isn't big enough for the iPad, but it will fit iPhones both tall and fat, and its mounting is both simple and easy to use.
Oh man, this iPad mount is either a fantastic idea, or a lawsuit waiting to happen: you decide. It’s called the BiKASE and it mounts your iPad onto the handlebars of your bike.
So you just had your own personal iPhone 5 unboxing. What next? If I were you, I’d hop on my bike and go burn a few calories, taking in the sunny view of the city as I go. But where would I put my new toy? After all, there are no iPhone 5 handlebar mounts available yet. Or maybe you live somewhere rainy and dull, and you want to keep your iPhone in a pocket or bag.
Luckily, the RFLKT now exists. It’s a little LCD bike computer that sits on your handlebars, only instead of just spitting out your speed and lap times, it displays sports info beamed to it from your iPhone — 5 or otherwise.