When my Garmin Edge 800 finally stopped working, I decided it might be better to rely on my mobile phone instead. After all, I have been going out on rides for nearly a year with my phone in my back pocket with Strava on and I have been using Strava to construct routes on rides that I haven't been on before.
With a brand new Samsung Galaxy S7 mobile phone provided by my employer, I also thought that its battery life might be good enough to last me on a decent length ride.
However it turned out not to be as simple as I hoped. When I visited four bike shops in central London I was told that they didn't actually stock a bike mount for a Samsung S7. Yes, if you want one for an iPhone then they had them in stock. But a Samsung...no chance. Now I don't want to sound like a cheerleader for Samsung but what is the thinking that all cyclists must be an Apple devotee. Yes, I am typing this on a MacBook and my wife has an Apple phone but there are far more Android phones out there and surely manufacturers should be coping with this.
When I got to the Condor Cycles, they suggested I try a xxx, which is designed to mount any mobile phone onto the handlebars of a bike. It was a cheap option and one they said other people had found okay. I tried it on a 150km ride from London to Wiltshire and it was an absolute disaster, flipping and flopping all ovr the place and basically being absolutely useless. I spent most of the ride stopping and trying to work out which route to follow, which meant plenty of delays and stress and basically ruined six hours in the saddle.
Which is how I ended up searching the Interweb for alternative providers. And to be honest, the choice was pretty rubbish. There's a lot of people out there on eBay and Amazon trying to flog you something that does the job but there's very little additional information available apart from some poorly photographed examples of how it might look in an ideal world in a studio with a bike that has never ridden more than five metres.
I have to admit that I wasn't sure I was doing the right thing when I bought the Tigra Sports mount case and bike strap, which claimed to be specifically designed for a Samsung Galaxy S7. First thing, I had to buy it direct from Tigra Sports in France. Their website isn't the best in the world and all the emails come from something called Blossum.eu, which may or may not be part of Tigra, but I parted with 44.95 euros (£34.96 at the current Brexit hit exchange rates) for the mountcase kit including courier from France.
I won't go into the detailed complications of the courier apart from to tell you that DHL are a bunch of lying toerags who can't be trusted to deliver when they say they will and appear to actually put false information up to annoy their customers. I almost lost the will to live last Wednesday.
When the Tigra package arrived I wasn't massively impressed. The plastic cover that the phone goes into wasn't clear at all and basically looked like it was incredibly scuffed up and impossible to see through. You can see from the attached photo (taken immediately after opening the packaging) that it looks like thick clouds are going across the screen. I was almost tempted to send it back but I also wanted to take it on a ride to test it out without having to resort to the previously hopeless option.
Attaching the bike strap to the handlebars of my Condor Baracchi was super easy and took around a minute with an Allen key and then felt very solid and stable. Clipping in the case to it - rather similar to putting in a Garmin but with possibly an even stronger connection - was easy and I felt pretty happy with the whole set up. Once the phone was in the case the brightness of the screen shone through the fog of the plastic, although I still wonder whether there was a manufacturing fault rather than Tigra deliberately making them that way.
I tested the Tigra on a 107km ride from London to Cambridgeshire using a Strava guide and it worked well. I always prefer riding in a group with someone who knows the way so I am not a great fan of following the blue dot on a phone in front of me but the Tigra did its job and I got to my destination in four hours (and also reviewed the Rapha helmet) with only a couple of missed turns, mainly thanks to my own incompetence.
Would I recommend the Tigra for Samsung S7 users? Yes, definitely. It does come with a mount that either fits into your stem cap or is a forward mount from your bars, which looks more professional than the version I got which is possibly more commuter/long distance rider look and feel. Perhaps I should have got one of those other mounts, although actually I felt happy enough with what I did end up with.
Tigra's Cross Lok system means that you can buy different mounts (eg for your car) and switch the carrier case from your different vehicles, which is a useful feature if you want to use it as a sat nav in your car. They will try and cross-sell you all that sort of stuff when you go to their website!
Tigra Mountcase Bike Kit for Samsung Galaxy S7
34.95 euros + shipping (10 euros extra outside France)
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