Lezyne Smart Vice Phone Mount

The Lezyne Smart Vice Phone Mount is a secure and convenient way to carry your phone on your handlebar. Quick to fit or remove, it fits any size of phone and pivots between landscape and portrait. If you need your phone in sight, it’s a great choice.

The evolution of phones into navigation and sports tracking devices means increasing numbers of cyclists want their phones mounted within view on their handlebars. Solutions like Quad Lock are one answer – but you need to buy into the ecosystem approach of a case for your phone plus the mount, which can get expensive. For an iPhone 14, the Quad Lock case plus out-front mount makes for a £49 investment – and if you change phones, you’ll probably need to buy a new case.

Using your phone for navigating, finding the nearest coffee stop, planning a cycling route on holiday, or something else? Check out our guide to the best cycling apps.

The alternative is a mount that clamps your phone in or out of any sort of case. With almost all phones these days being waterproof and dust-proof and most modern screens being made of hardened glass, the need for a case is not as critical as it used to be – so maybe a simple phone holder can be the answer, at least for casual use.

Enter the Lezyne Smart Vice Phone Mount. If you’re familiar with Lezyne bike lights you’ll immediately recognise the rubber-ladder-strap mount, which quickly and easily wraps around any handlebar, and doesn’t budge a millimetre, let alone an inch. Of course this means it’s not locked to your bike – so if you’re using it as a phone holder for commuting or about-town rides you may want to remove it once you park your bike.

The phone holder (‘vice’ or even ‘vise’ in Americanese) is a machined alloy clamp with a knurled knob that you wind down to clamp your phone securely. The jaws and backing of the clamp are lined with a soft, grippy rubber material that shouldn’t mark your phone. The depth of the clamp arms is enough to hold a phone in the chunkiest of cases – the spec is a maximum case depth of 22mm, and width of between 57 and 102mm.

With no phone in the mount the movable jaw does rattle a bit – even winding it in tight, it still makes a noise. Fortunately, if that really bugs you, the whole mount comes off in a second and fits easily into a bag or pocket.

It takes quite a few winds to adjust as the thread pitch is quite fine. But once you have it set to the size of your phone, the act of inserting and tightening or loosening and removing your phone is only a few seconds.

You can swap from landscape to portrait with a twist, and the phone stays put as there is exactly the right amount of friction involved.

I hammered about pretty rowdy mountain bike trails with my iPhone 14 in the Smart Vice Phone Mount and it didn’t budge even after hours of riding. While it’s always recommended to use a tether of some sort in case of a catastrophic mount failure, I felt comfortable enough not to bother.

Scouting about the internet for alternative takes, I did find a few people claiming the Lezyne had worked loose and dropped their phones. Whether these were older versions, or weren’t tightened sufficiently or re-checked after a while or whatever, these cases do back up the value of using a case with a tether attached to your bar.

Value & conclusion

There are literally hundreds of options for holding your phone on your handlebar, ranging from cheap to premium. Personally, I’ve invested in the Quad Lock ecosystem, but that includes car use as well as the general need for a case. At £31 the Lezyne option is premium, but the quality of the handlebar mount and the phone clamp justifies the price. I found using my Quad Lock-encased phone in the Lezyne mount worked very well, and meant I didn’t need to shift the Quad Lock mounts across our fleet of bikes to use.

I can see the Smart Vice being a hit with regular city bike users, as a way to quickly fit and securely hold your phone for navigating. Overall, it’s a quality bit of kit. I wish it didn’t rattle when empty, but that’s a small issue – if I didn’t have a phone installed I’d remove it from the bar.

Verdict

Solid, easy-to use phone mount that quickly fits to any bike and phone

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