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forum
Smartphones and long rides: The Strategy
There's a lot of discussion around smartphones vs. Garmins for long rides. In one corner, Garminados waffle about 15hr battery life, waterproofness and size, while in the geek corner Mobilistas tout cheap smartphones with a few extra batteries as the way to go, not doubling up on tech as the Garmin crowd carry mobiles anyway.
I present proof positive that a smartphone - even one 4 years old - can do the job. This screenshot is 5 1/2hrs into a 'ride', recording with Strava and using Viewranger for navigation, at 25% battery left. Critically the Viewranger Trip screen has been on all the time, with the nav arrow and other information displayed - meaning it can do a ride of over 7 hours with the display on permanently. Brightness was turned down, but it was still quite visible. Also the phone was connected to 3UK the whole time, mobile data and WiFi turned off.
Noting that if you set the screen to auto-off after say 15 seconds, you can wake it to check direction at an intersection, then it will go back to sleep automatically. This will dramatically improve battery life to about 12hrs in this case, as you see below screen power accounts for nearly half battery usage.
So you have Strava logging, always-on navigation, plus can receive calls/SMS. With the option to turn on mobile data to check email if really needed.
The phone in this case is a Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc, but for £40-ish you could have a Motorola Defy from eBay, rated IP67 waterproof and pretty shockproof to boot. Stem-mount it on £27-worth of Quadlock and you have a quarter-turn easy on-off solution that is weatherproof and can have its always-on runtime doubled to around 12hrs using £10 worth of extra battery. Or out to 24hrs if you have screen sleep enabled.
If/when you do need to stop and swap batteries, a Strava TCX/GPX file can be joined using one of a few methods to give that all-important one long ride.
The 4.4-star rated Viewranger app is free for Android and iOS. You can purchase Viewranger maps for less than half of the Garmin cost and the online route planning tool is genius. £90 gets you all of the UK (£199 from Garmin), or smaller bits are priced applicably less. Or you can download Openstreetmap / Opencyclemap tiles for free *from the app, on the mobile* and use them anywhere in the world. This can be done whilst on the road, no laptop needed - for example, using free Wifi in a café. Did this in Belgium last year- worked flawlessly.
Hopefully this goes some way to clearing the air and giving people hope that quality, robust on-bike long-ride nav, logging and comms is perfectly do-able for less than £100.
If you're new please join in and if you have questions pop them below and the forum regulars will answer as best we can.
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88 comments
This seems like a great idea in theory, however turn by turn based navigation doesn't really work all that great on a bike. Most of the GPS routes you pull from websites don't have turn data, and even those that do can be pretty sketchy. I've long given up on turn guidance on the Edge 800 and just follow the map now, no one I know with bike GPS has ever been able to get satisfactory turn by turn navigation.
The turn data is also usually based on how cars drive, which is often quite different from how you might tackle a corner on a bike.
For shorter rides, "track navigator" on android is a great free app, which loads routes directly from www.ridewithgps.com and reads out (text-to-speech) the prompts on the cue sheet (which you can edit on ridewithgps.)
Unfortunately it uses google maps not openstreetmap tiles, so you have to have data on or the map disappears. You can still have the voice prompts and breadcrumbs with data off, but would be awesome if the developer added OSM support.
My main concerns with putting a phone on the bars is that most are not designed to be shock proof, and it is hard to find a decent phone mount that is adequately secure and provides weather protection. I put mine in a top tube bag designed for the purpose ("the rules" are for posers
) which works fairly well and provides good shock protection, but it rubs my knees slightly when standing (i prefer to stay seated most of the time anyway) and you have to look down a long way to see the screen.
I've also heard from others that use BTLE that they have had a lot of problems with sensors losing connection half way through the ride
Good thread, wish had read similar long time ago! I ditched my Garmin Edge 305 with power problems and rather than buy another I put my iPhone 4S on the bars of both my bikes using a Topeak iPhone Ride case for £30. Very stable/secure, ridden a few thousand miles on the road now without problem.
If weather dodgy I use the silicone cover the ride case comes with, if full-on rain I use an extra Topeak dry bag on same mount.
I bought an extra Topeak battery that straps with Velcro under the stem, about £50. Reasonably out of sight and not heavy, if not exactly sexy. I'm using Cyclemeter (more power hungry but loads of custom stats, graphs & maps) and linked by Bluetooth to HR & Speed/Cadence sensors. Get around 6 hours from the battery then 4 hours from the phone battery but also bought a 2nd battery for Coast-to-Coast-in-a-day and Derbyshire to Devon over 2 days. Strava definitely better for power usage (I just upload by email from Cyclemeter) and I'm keen to try the navigation app others mentioned as an alternative.
Only problems have been with Topeak batteries, had to send 2 back with damaged micro-USB connectors and 2 with damaged cables, not damaged whilst riding though. Once sorted have been great and now happy have got a set up that will see me through longest of day-rides with all the live data even a data-head like me could ever want. The dry bag is sealed so can't plug in the external battery but then 4 hours or so is plenty long enough for me if it's that wet. Before the Topeak bike-specific batteries I also used an extra iPhone battery pack sat in a tri-bag on the top tube which did the job too but some iPhone cables were a pain stopping charging & bleeping.
i backed it, so i should have one to play with in the indeterminate future
Good luck with the not stopping, very advanced riding there, did you go on a course?
And you can shove velotwaty rules up franks ass:-/
Map simple, the art will be lost, and you can have prompts on the stem, font size 8 cc size laminated, I get over a ton rides worth of info on it. No battery no failure, water proof and costs zero pence.
'Not stopping' means not having to stop. And unfold a map. And be certain you know where you are. While everyone else waits impatiently, getting cold. It's called having your shit together as a leader.
Yes I can read a map. I can also triangulate and do back-bearings in mils as well as ° ' ". That's not the point.
And there isn't a top tube let alone stem long enough to hold Audax-grade prompts on the sort of rides we do around here where most roads are less than a mile before a turn. Try typing out 70-100 turns, then tell me it's a: bulletproof and b: fun.
Turn sheets are fine so long as your speedo *and* plotting are accurate. Forget to re-zero one and you're screwed. No solution is perfect.
Did the first long ride with my new Sony Xperia Z1 compact today. It's fully waterproof (IP58), so that means no case needed; i used a Finn bike mount on the stem.
I ran it with Viewranger mapping and GPS recording in Strava. I didn't turn any of the connections off, just stuck it straight on the bars. I ran the screen on a 1-minute timeout and clicked the clicky button every time i wanted to check the map: you can set it so there's no screen lock, so one click gets you straight back to the map.
We did 5h15m on the bike including stops (where it was still on the bike recording) and come the finish I still had 50% battery life left.
So I'm sold, pretty much. Ideally someone would produce a skin-type case that turns the small clicky button on the side into a big fumbly button for gloves, and also has a quarter-turn mount on the back. Then it's be more or less perfect
Dave, how VERY DARE YOU do a ride of more than 35 minutes without flattening your battery, despite it not being used for ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL.
You clearly are in error - only individually-laminated 1-point font Post-It notes or £10,000 Garmins are capable of doing any sort of on-bike navigation to the standards required. A member of the Non-Smartphominati will be around Road.CC Towers to commence your Education, just as soon as they work out the route, print it in nano-particle-friendly font and convert it to a file format known only to the Oracle of Alexandria for upload.
Easy Mike, steady and relax.
BUT just in case you do still suffer from premature drainage then you could consider carrying something like this:
http://www.ianker.com/support-c1-g95.html
I just got one as an on-the-road / emergency backup / recharger. It will either recharge or act as a drip feed if you keep it plugged in will the phone is on and claims to charge a 'regular' phone battery from flat at least once.
..and if you just want to use google maps when you're out and about you can save a chunk of map to use offline (STW for instructions) and then all you need is GPS running, no data or mobile signal. It can't give you any navigation instructions but you can at least see where you are.
Heh. Firmly
Nice external bty. I have been eyeing the bike-perfected Topeak one for ages, but it's about £50.
If you have offline maps in Viewranger (either OS or free OpenStreetMap), you can do proper nav in airplane mode. No data required.
I have to admit to a very low-tech solution to this problem. Take along a plug and lead and plug phone in half-way through a long day in a pub/cafe. Not suitable for all types of rides but works fine for me. Battery on my iPhone 3GS lasts about 5/6 hours in any case but I was sometimes out for longer in the winter and needed a pub stop to warm up a bit in any case. Thought about buying an extra battery but no need so far!
You have a chance to use it in the rain yet? One of the reasons Garmin cite for avoiding smartphone style capacitive displays on their bike computers is in addition to capacitive displays not working with gloves, rain water can trigger the touch sensing on capacitive displays, triggering false inputs. Curious to hear how well the Z1 works in this scenario.
I've read complaints from some Mio 505 bike computer users that rain water does indeed cause touch screen button presses on its capacitive display, similarly in reviews of the Z1 I've seen it pointed out the display can't work underwater (although you'd hope on the bike total submersion isn't going to happen!)
Interested to hear your thoughts on this Dave, I've just got the Z2 handset myself and am also looking at options for mounting the phone on the stem.
How do you get on with the Finn, particularly for a handset of this size? Whilst it's only a tenner, I do have niggling doubts as to quite how robustly it will hold a £600 handset in place!
I've otherwise been looking at the aforementioned Quad Lock, they don't make (and aren't planning to make - I did ask) a case specifically for the latest Sony handsets, so you'd need the universal kit which then just sticks to any old hard case. With the 10% code you get by simply signing up to their email list, the universal kit is a little over £20, plus another tenner for a reasonable quality case.
As for your issue with using the side button to wake the phone, have you tried the feature to wake the phone by double-tapping the screen instead? I've admittedly yet to try this with gloves on myself, but I'm sure there's also a glove mode buried somewhere in the settings too.
Having done probably 1000k on crap Hampshire roads using the Finn mount to hold an iPhone5, a large Android phone (both in and out of a pOcpac) and the stupid-large Phablet-size Quechera one Dave reviewed a while back, I can attest that the Finn is indeed Good Enough. Basically, if you've hit something so hard that the phone comes out of the Finn mount, you have a lot more important things to be fretting about than an insurance claim for a mobile. Like walking / breathing
Not as good as airplane mode, but if you still want to be contactable you can turn off 3G, leaving basic GSM telephone/SMS still on, and that will save a good bit of battery. ROMs like Cyanogenmod have a quick-setting tile for it, otherwise go into the settings.
Like Mike said, the Finn will hold pretty much anything smaller than a 7" tablet. so you're all good there. the main issue i have with it is that if you want to take your phone off for a quick photo, you can't. it's a faff. a quadlock would be better. especially one that let you mount your phone out front...
i didn't really have an issue with the clicky button. i just think it'll be a bit more difficult with thick gloves on. at the moment, it's fine. double click to wake could work, the Z1 compact has a 'glove mode' which makes the screen more sensitive but that could be A Bad Thing if rain triggers the screen.
screens/rain: no, not yet, or at least not a *lot* of rain. i've used it in drizzle but not a downpour. i will report back when the inevitable happens
Thanks for the input.
Sounds like the Finn might be worth more of a look than I'd first given it credit for then, and even if it doesn't turn out to be a long-term solution then it's only a tenner ventured. If it is a bit fiddly to get out of the mount then there's perhaps an issue with quickly being able to take a call, but I guess there's speakerphone for that!
Quick question to those that do have one, can it be used to mount a phone in portrait orientation on the stem, or only on the bars?
Your point KiwiMike about having more to worry about than just a phone if you've hit something so hard as to make it pop out of the case is probably fair, I share the same broken Hampshire roads with you anyway, so good to hear relevant testimony.
Once I get a solution sorted out, I'll update with my experiences of using a waterproof phone in the rain.
I use my finn on the stem and mount the phone landscape. you have to mount the phone in the same orientation to the mount wherever you put it. so landscape on the stem, portrait on the bars
So noone is going to buy the new Garmin Edge 1000 then?
I don't know much about this area but it does strike me that for the cost of the Garmin you could buy an extremely impressive Smart phone which is probably more powerful. Or am I missing something?
I expect it'll fly off the shelves, but I'm with you, I just don't get the point of paying hundreds for a standalone GPS when I've already got a GPS-enabled phone with all manner of (free) apps available for both navigation and performance tracking.
Trust me, I'm interested in buying one. I just wonder if I'd be better off buying a new smart phone. My current one is ok for strava but the screen is not so great. I'm still tempted by the Garmin.
I'm buying one, although this is mainly because I'm doing a lot of touring in Europe over the summer so I can't use my mobile whilst abroad - and I can get a decent price on the 1000. £370 (potentially £350) on it.
On a 16hr ride last year I used my Garmin 310 (no HRM to squeeze a bit more battery out), I carried my iPhone 4s but had to use Google maps a few times, only checked it half a dozen times but it really ate into the battery.
I must admit till I read this I didn't know Strava would still work on Airplane mode. I sometimes carry a Monkey Charger to boost the phone battery, think there's smaller better ones out there now.
you have to be careful using airplane mode on some phones (including iphone) - the GPS will continue to work once connected, but if it loses the connection it *won't* re-acquire it.
Really????
I find that difficult to believe but still highly believable, the whole point of airplane mode is to disable those parts of the phone that the CAA and FAA oddly believe to be dangerous to the systems of the aircraft. A GPS connection would most certainly fall into that category.
I cannot believe that to be a design intent, more likely a bug - So dont shout about it...
https://strava.zendesk.com/entries/21292027-Extending-iPhone-Battery-Life
GPS wouldn't be classed as dangerous by the CAA and FAA because it's receive-only
It is intended to be disabled however:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1355
And yes, it doesn't make the most sense! The rules are changing but they were for any comms at all causing interference.
I switched from using multiple apps on an iPhone5 to a really basic Garmin 200 - and much prefer the latter. I still carry the iPhone but given that the Garmin is only 58g, the weight penalty argument doesn't really wash. I prefer the Garmin for a number of reasons:
in related news, i'm chatting to the guys at raceware direct (the 3d printing chaps) about options for mounting a phone out front. more on that when there is more...
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