Tested brutally! Bicycle smartphone handlebar mounts

welcome to another episode of burn peak express and today we're going to be doing something a little different but kind of the same we're going to be reviewing mounts for your handlebars that hold cell phones now you have to ask yourself why would you want to do that ever there's two main reasons one of them is navigation if you're a commuter even if you're a mountain biker you need to figure out where you're going and there are lots of apps that do that for us now the other reason you might want to mount your cell phone to your handlebars is data if you're using strava or map my ride you can have bluetooth heart rate monitors power meters and of course there are other devices that help you monitor data but a cell phone is the most easy entry into that so we do have a lot of people who are in fact mounting their phones to their bike handlebars i want to see which ones of these mounts are actually going to do the best job of it and we're going to torture test these we're going to put the phone in and we're going to do hard hits we're going to use the new drop i am not too excited about putting my iphone in there because i cost me a lot of money and i don't want to break it so i was able to get a sponsor to send us a phone samsung sent us their new nebula it's replacing the galaxy this is an advanced copy we're gonna mount this there as sort of the stunt double to my iphone so let's start with this first one we're gonna call this mount the silico which appears to be made of all rubber okay interesting this is actually quality it's kind of heavier than i thought it was gonna be let's install it on the handlebars first not half bad looking i don't like how this hangs so much off the back i mean whose handlebar is so big around where you need all this extra here that's certainly strange this seems secure enough now let's put our samsung nebula on here oh guys i think we're running into our first snag here samsung made an interesting choice instead of going slimmer they put like a 100 000 milliamp hour battery on here i don't think this phone is going to fit here so i'm just going to use the iphone and hope for the best they do make it pretty snug it's not that easy to get on and off so it moves around a little bit and honestly i think that's probably a good thing if you're hitting bumps you don't want it to be rigid and snap off and break something you want it to move around one thing's for sure my face id is not working because this is covering the camera on my phone so i have to type in the passcode to open it i also can't do a lot of gestures on the phone because the corners are covered up the whole phone is just difficult to use but i say we take this out on the trail and see if it actually holds a phone it's baptism by fire [Music] okay so i think i had my front tire under inflated and i think it might have popped off the bead i barely have any air in it that made the descent extra interesting and if you look at the phone case it doesn't look like the phone's in danger coming out but it definitely moved do you want a mountain bike with this thing i think from that one test i could say probably not for our own curiosity i think i want to take this off the driveway jump and see how one big impact is going to affect it didn't move around as much as the rock guard it's in the same spot none of this stuff is slipping out of the way i say we take it off the drama memorial drop and see what happens so we've already learned something lots of successive bumps like the rock garden is actually more murderous on these phone holders than our just single large impacts that was by far the largest impact of the day i mean i clapped my suspension worked fine held up it might be the type of thing you have to babysit and that's the only thing that worries me about this like i said this has the tendency to creep that's one thing that we're going to pay attention to with the other phone cases do they want to creep up the handlebar guys we really did a number ah we really did a number on this tire oh oh god i'm not even thinking about what i'm doing i'm trying to just rush through this right now i just hate tire problems move on to the next one this is the vap plus universal for smartphones bicycle phone holder has a very similar design to the silica but it's a little more slim it doesn't have as much stuff hanging off of it so you push it in and it comes off now is that useful one thing i will say is it's easier to attach this while it's off the phone it feels tighter and more secure than our last model so that's good so what is nice about the vap is that when you don't have your phone attached you can still leave this holder here and not have all the rest of it hanging around and i kind of like that wow this is way more streamlined so after you tighten it to a certain point the thread kind of skips it's a plastic strap so i'm not surprised now we should be able to just latch this right on yeah it's on oh ooh that's not good we push it in and turn it how do i get this on so i got to give this a well low usability marks this thing moves around really easily it creeps across the handlebar i am not dropping into a rock garden with this thing can't tighten it nearly as much as the other one i'm gonna just say this one's a straight up fail you don't want to be putting even a cheap phone in this because even a cheap phone's a couple hundred bucks so we've got the samsung nebula i'm going to put this on the bars oh i'm getting a call [Music] hello don't worry guys that was a junk call all right we've got our nebula secured we've got this on the bars as tight as i can get it let's drop into the rock garden and see how she goes i don't know i kind of underestimated this thing i think you could use it riding around a city no problem you hit a couple of potholes you get a big bump it's gonna be fine wouldn't recommend it for mountain biking makes too much noise rattles around and like i said there's that handlebar creep issue it moves around way too easy so if you're gonna hit a whole bunch of bumps for a couple hours you're gonna constantly be babysitting this thing and reattaching it to where it's supposed to be so maybe for commuting it's good but for everything else i'd say no so for those of you who are crying foul because i tested this thing with a big heavy phone i'll have you know weighs less than an iphone samsung nebula is 5.5 ounces iphone weighs 7.5 ounces so we're actually going easy on it okay next product here i have the gub perfectly reasonable name for a phone holder i hear a lot of metal in here this appears to be way more robust than some of the other ones like i said though it being rigid isn't necessarily a good thing sometimes you want it to give a little bit when you're hitting bumps this appears to be well thought out i'm actually going to just look at the instructions and make sure i'm doing it right just to be fair to it they're using like text message slang in the instructions they said please pls this is awesome so the controls here are pretty simple you just turn this and it clamps down unfortunately it's not going to clamp down on our nebula it's sort of like squirms out so i'm gonna use my iphone good news is it appears to be pretty secure oh yeah there's nothing you could do to make this come out whoa we gotta get this way up the handlebar in order to get it to work i would say that for a mountain bike this is definitely not ideal now the good news is it's all very secure i don't feel weird about tightening this down on my handlebars because there is a rubber pad between the clamp and the bar man in a crash not good this might just be a no go for mountain biking right out of the gate let's get it out to the rock guard and see how it fares [Music] [Music] so that's as hard a hit as you're gonna ever take uh with a phone mounted to your handlebars so i would say this passes with flying colors this is excellent for a motorcycle maybe for a bike commuter the very fact that it sticks out and it's metal and it's got kind of sharp things sticking out doesn't make me feel too good about it for mountain biking though so we've explored three different styles of handlebar phone holders and we're moving on to the fourth and final one this is very popular this is called quad lock you're not going to find any misspellings in the instructions here it's got one major downside and that's you have to change your phone case and then you can get a variety of mounts i chose the mount that i thought was kind of the coolest so we're gonna pop my iphone into this hopefully it fits it does the case is super nice i actually like this case better than the one i got from apple it's grippy but it's still smooth enough where i can get it in out of my pocket i might just leave this case on the build quality on this mount is truly heads and tails above the rest of the ones that we reviewed today i mean it's lightweight it's solid it's well designed on each piece they list the actual bar diameter and this is for a 35 millimeter i don't have to put any pads in i can just clamp it directly to my bar it's plastic on carbon so that's okay get it reasonably tight not too tight now i can just take the phone in the case and just snap it into place and it's not going to rotate it's not going to come off unless i push down this button and then turn it and then it comes off it's very intuitive heard a lot of people talk about these i've seen them and it deserves its reputation so far but we still have to go through a rock garden and we still have to hit a couple of jumps and drops so that will be the verdict [Music] so i gotta say pretty flawless nice and out of the way gives just enough to provide some shock absorption doesn't budge hitting that thing on a hard tail it's just something i don't like doing hardtails are fun that's not fun that's brutal it's just like the old drama drop so we succeeded looks like this mount succeeded as well it didn't even show the slightest signs of giving in so let's go back up to the garage and conclude this so what did we learn today i would say for casual riding around the city or whatever you can pretty much use any of these they all did a pretty good job of holding the phone i would say this one was the most iffy with this little thing in the rotating piece i'm not a particular fan the silico although being a little bulky and ugly it was pretty secure it held the phone a little bit of handlebar creep but it's really safe because it's made of rubber for the price and functionality this isn't bad i wouldn't do any long sustained mountain bike descents with it because it's probably going to creep up the handlebars the gub i gotta say it's really secure not too big of a fan of all the metal sticking out in terms of rider safety i gotta say it's a little bit iffy now if you're actually mountain biking and you want to use your phone as a bicycling computer a quad lock style solution seems to be the only way to go it is way secure really really streamlined poses no sort of safety hazards the only downside to quad lock besides paying a little more is that your phone has to work in their ecosystem so if you have some new advanced phone like the samsung nebula they don't make a case for it doesn't work with quad lock so you would have to have a popular phone like the samsung galaxy or the iphone i hope you enjoyed testing these phone mounts with me today i know it's a silly video but i get a lot of joy out of making these and right now i'm going through some pretty tough times right now and to be able to share these experiences with you guys and just have an excuse to take my bike off some drops it's really a fun thing so thanks for watching if you haven't subscribed yet we post a video on burn peak express every sunday thanks for riding with me today i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Berm Peak Express

Views: 1,185,333

Rating: 4.9330502 out of 5

Keywords: mountain biking, mtb, cycling, bicycling, cross country mtb, xc mtb, smartphone

Id: 3-MHZIjwakE

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2020