Review of Finn, the universal bracket for your bike

Today we’re going to try some unconventional support. We are used to seeing all kinds of supports in all kinds of places: the universal support in Decathlon, the Chinese support, the guy who carries it with a McGyver-style ribbon… Well, if your means of transport is the bicycle, this Austrian support is made for you. It is suitable for all phones, takes up little space and weighs nothing, and it is suitable for any bicycle and type of handlebar. Besides, it’s cheap!

We’ve talked repeatedly about mounts for our iPhone, such as the Mountek MT5000 for the car or the Z-base, a multi-functional dock. But rarely have we talked about sports mounts, as the accessory we are dealing with today. Specifically, it’s a universal holder for any type of smartphone – whether it’s an iPhone, any Samsung, HTC, Nokia… – for any bicycle.

First impressions

We’re talking about Finn today. Finn is made by BikeCityGuide, the developer of the same application we will talk about later. Designed by cyclists for cyclists from Austria. Best of all, it’s universal, for any smartphone for any bike handlebars, quality and robust and very small in size.

Availability and prices

You will find Finn on the official website of the same product. One of its strong points is its price: 12 euros for each Finn with free shipping. It also includes a code to unlock the BikeCityGuide application for a specific city, valued at 4.49 euros, so if you are going to use it, it is worth it.

Analysis

Finn is delivered in an ideal packaging, tailor-made for the stand, with instructions inside. The construction of the accessory is robust. The difference between the handlebars is only a few centimetres, but you can tell that the silicone is of good quality. It remains to be seen how it holds up after a long period of daily use.

Hooking it to your handlebar is very simple. Just put it on the handlebar, slide one side through the middle groove, stretch and fix the ends of our smartphone with the silicone. It couldn’t be simpler. No screws, no hard plastic, no casings… You can also leave it without smartphone on top.

The good thing is that it keeps the iPhone very firmly attached to our bike. As you can see in the video it resists almost everything. I can’t tell you what it’s like to go downhill with it because I don’t do it, but it’s ideal for getting around town or on the road. It will depend on the brightness of the screen and whether you have an anti-glare protector that makes the screen look better or worse in daylight.

What is a bit limited is the usability of the phone. With uneven terrain or if we try to tap on the screen the iPhone will move too much to be used normally, for example, to answer a message, if it’s something short and fast there will be no problem. The best use will be navigation or sports applications such as Strava or Endomondo, and it will even be possible to use the back or front camera if we want to record a video or take pictures.

BikeCityGuide

As I just said, one of the best uses for Finn is navigation, for this reason with your Finn is included a code to download the BikeCityGuide application for free. The application itself is free, what costs money is to unlock the cities for navigation and get directions or tours.

Each city costs 4.49 euros , although you can try one for the first 30 kilometers. Note that the maps used by the application are from OpenStreetMap. Thanks to the community behind the wiki there are bike lanes in many cities.

The problem is precisely this, the cities: at the moment in the application you can only navigate through Barcelona . There are 14 cities in Germany, 4 in Austria (Graz is free), 5 in Switzerland, 3 in the Netherlands and 1 in Belgium.

The operation of the application is very simple. It works like any other navigation application: you can set a destination point and it will even guide you with step-by-step audio notifications. Places of interest are marked on the map, as well as the possibility of taking guided tours of different areas of the city made by the application’s users.

Right now in Barcelona you can do the Art and Culture tour, passing by the Olympic Museum, the CosmoCaixa, the Parc Güell, the Boquería… etc; the Beach tour, the Panorama Montjuïc tour or the architecture of Barcelona. With this we can discover the city by bike. It is also useful to make a tour in one of the available European cities, always together with the Finn support.

By the way, the application has as a feature the navigation offline , so it can be interesting in foreign cities or to save tariff data. The good thing is that: you can carry the Finn in any pocket, rent a bike, and ride around the city guided by the application.

It is ready for iOS 7 although I only found one bug : I used the code to unlock and download the maps of Barcelona, I restored my iPhone to iOS 7, and when I came back to install the application and wanted to restore “the purchase” of the city, there is no way to download it. I imagine they will solve it soon.

Conclusions

85

It’s certainly worth what you pay for and does its job well. I didn’t expect the result of something so simple to be so good. It’s not the same as a typical universal holder for smartphones , with its screws and sockets… It’s simple but not complete, not to be confused. Other mounts available on the market offer, in addition to other types of fastening, safety and protection. This is not the case, let’s be clear.

As you can see, it’s simply a matter of support, you take care of the protection. Moreover, after watching the promotional video, one is more relaxed about the support. The only drawback I have found is the stability of the phone. As I said, I don’t suffer from the hold, but rather because it stays put when I want to hit OK, introduce a route modification, or anything else on the screen of the smartphone .

Finn

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