Hi all, I just got a new bike and I want to find a good solid way to attach my mobile phone somewhere near the stem. I want to be able to track some of my rides and use the phone for navigation sometimes too so it has to be visible & touchable wherever I mount it.
My bike (Cannondale Topstone 2 gravel) has mounts for a top tube bag, or I think I've seen some sort of secure mounts in use by folks I ride with.
One thing to be aware of is that riding around a lot with the phone attached can cause the stabilisation sensor in the camera to go wrong. When this happens your camera feed starts wobbling around all the time. This happened to a friend of mine and let's just say his snapchat stories had a very distinctive look :)
I'm not sure whether more expensive mounts do a better job with this (I think his was quite cheap) but make sure to do your research if you're planning on using it a lot, and you care about your phone's camera.
It is also a point of critique for quadlock (and i guess sp as well), i have been riding with my current phone attached for about 15000 km, including thousands of km on chunky surfaces, i have not had this problem, neither did i with the phones i had before. I feel very confident to continue using this system. But yeah, i guess there is a risk.
I used to have a silicon strap phone mount in the beginning, but the phone was rattling like crazy on rocky surfaces, very confident that the stem mount is much milder on the phone.
Was your friend isong the phone on a bicycle or motorcycle?
I'm asking because it's not only a matter of hard vibrations, but also the frequencies invovled, and motorcycles engone can stimulate the wrong ones, while I was unaware of issues on bicycles.
It was just from cycling. Perhaps he just got unlucky though? From the sounds of things his experience seems like an outlier.
Or he was just so fast that the vibration frequency matched that of a motorbike 😁