You’ve got the bike, you’ve got the gear and you’ve got your licence; what more do you need for riding? Probably not much, but there a great many gadgets that can hugely enhance riding, whether it be keeping you toasty, allowing you to look back at your best moments, keep in touch or simply not get lost.
Keeping You Warm - Heated Gear
Oxford, one of the staples of motorcycle accessories, has a great many electronics accessories that can make riding more enjoyable. Their classic accessory is the ‘hot grip’, aka a heated grip. While heated gloves are arguably more effective when it’s really cold, the heated grip is extremely flexible as it works with any gloves and are extremely useful for long rides going into the night as it cools down, and they can extend summer gloves into the spring and autumn. Starting at £49.99 for a pair of grips, this can be the ideal bike upgrade for the UK biker.
Keis go a step further with their heated clothing, with gloves, gilets, jackets and boot inserts that can be tethered to your bike’s electrical system, or with their latest kit, attached to lightweight lithium batteries that integrate into the gear. It’s fair to say this is premium kit, and it will cost a fair amount more than the aforementioned heated grips, but its capability is a step above.
Record Your Ride - Helmet Cameras
The recent trend for many car drivers is to add a dash cam to their windscreen – for preventing insurance dramas it’s a godsend, and bikers can get in on the act too with a helmet camera. It’s also ideal for having a first-person viewpoint of touring and best moments on a ride for you to playback or share. While GoPro absolutely has the best image quality possible, they’re also expensive and have terrible aerodynamics, making them hard to recommend as helmet cameras. Drift Innovation on the other hand, while not matching GoPro for image quality, make cameras that still produce great video but it a much more helmet friendly form, with an adjustable lens, solid 5 hour battery life and sleek shape. The Drift Ghost X is arguably the ideal solid helmet camera, with a wide 140 degree field of view and 1080p Full HD recording for great detail. The fact it can withstand rain and dirt without a case is a major selling point over a GoPro too!
Stay In Touch - Motorcycle Intercoms
We covered keeping in touch on the bike a short while ago, with our blog about motorcycle intercoms – check it out here if you want to see some of the best ones available for all budgets. If you want the gadget that takes care of being a helmet camera, lets you talk to people wirelessly and keep you entertained with music then the Sena 10C Evo is the one to beat. Packing 4K video and all the Bluetooth and intercom features of a top-end headset this is the intercom to beat, but of course this will be at the top end of many people’s budgets. Sena, Cardo and Interphone all offer intercoms with varying feature sets that allow for only Bluetooth phone calls, all the way up to 24 riders, all spaced apart by kilometres all in the same call.
Find The Best Route - Motorcycle Sat Navs and Phone Holders
Following on from intercoms, the sat nav is an extremely useful gadget to have when exploring unfamiliar roads – dedicated motorcycle sat navs feature weatherproofing, glove-ready touchscreens and usually a feature to find twisty roads for you. We’d be lying if we said your phone couldn’t do a lot of this also however! Weatherproof mounts for your phone are now available also, allowing you to display your screen to navigate, and with an intercom hear what’s going on, or listen to music, while you ride. Some people love a dedicated sat nav – a dedicated device means you can stop and use your phone without issue, and there aren’t any messages/calls/etc. popping up halfway through riding through a city. Others enjoy the live maps that Google can offer with a mobile, as well as only having one battery to charge at the end of the day.
Whichever works for you, Oxford Aqua Dryphone mounts are an ideal budget way of getting your phone displayed, while the more premium SP Connect use a neat quick-release system to securely mount your phone. Meanwhile, both TomTom and Garmin offer motorcycle satnavs. The Garmin Zumo XT shows where sat navs are nowadays, with it able to do much of what a phone can do when connected to a headset, offering satellite imagery, ride sharing, call handling, music playback all with an IPX7 weather rating, so no case is required at all.
If you need some expert advice, then you can have a chat online with us via web chat on our website. We’ve finally reopened with our café opening for takeaway at the weekends. If you’re a bit far from Stevenage, our online shop is alive and well, and taking orders for delivery. You can also check out our full range on our website with free delivery for any order over £50 on the UK mainland, and delivery possible to almost anywhere else. Not only that but our ‘No Quibble’ returns policy allows for returns within a 365-day period – see our returns page for more details.
