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Palm Phone $350The Palm Phone is tiny, but its bite-sized stature means
it’s a fully functional smar t phone that could replace
your head unit.
The Palm is about the size of a business card, yet it
feels solid in your hand. With an IP68 rating, it can sur-
vive dusty, dir ty trails and a rainstorm, too. And like your
current phone, it has front/back camera capability—the
rear camera is 12mp and has a flash; the selfie is 8mp.
It’ll run apps such as Strava or Ride with GPS, and
handles tracking and navigating nicely. When paired
with an out-front mount, it’s about as big as the larg-
est cycling-specific head units. The downside is if you
are using it in place of a cycling computer, you won’t
get the same batter y life as you would with a dedicated
GPS unit.
An unexpected bonus of using the phone as a head
unit is the ease of mapping. Instead of having to load a
route to the device, you can simply run the map func-
tion or choose a route from the app of your choice.
The competitive pricing and versatility of the Palm
is a real selling point, especially in the current world
of $1K phones. If you’re looking to get a new phone
and plan on using it to map and track your rides, you
should cer tainly check out this little device from Palm.
—Trevor RaabTHE COOLEST
THING ON MY DESKThe Palm can
survive dusty,
dirty trails.Resistant under
water to a depth
of five feet up
to 30 minutes.Has front/back
camera capabil-
ity—the rear
camera is 12mp
and has a flash;
the selfie is 8mp.THE LIGHT THAT STAYS BRIGHT
You can buy rear lights
based on their brightness
and battery life, but neither
of those figures tells you
how powerful the light will
be when it’s two-thirds
of the way through its
charge. To learn more about
how these lights perform
throughout their battery
lives, we tested four popular
models with a handheld
digital illuminance meter
that detects lux (a measure
of a light’s perceived inten-
sity to the human eye). We
evaluated Bontrager’s Flare
RT, NiteRider’s Sentr y Aero
260, Specialized’s Flash-
back , and Serfas’s Thunder-
bolt, setting them to their
brightest settings, lettingthem run down, and record-
ing changes in brightness
as the batteries drained. We
took down each light’s initial
lux figure in a dark room and
repeated the process ever y
30 minutes for 4.5 hours
(the estimated battery life
of Bontrager’s Flare RT, the
test’s longest-lasting light).
Lux figures var y by the
distance between the light
source and the illuminance
meter, so we put just three
feet between the devices
in order to get the dimmer
red lights to register on the
meter. For our purposes,
the actual lux number was
insignificant—the important
thing was to determine the
decline in lux over run time.BATTERY LIFEIL
LU
MI
NA
NC
E^ (
LU
X)
Bontrager Flare RT
Serfas Thunderbolt
NiteRider Sentry Aero 260
Specialized FlashbackThis (^) ligh
t
keeps go
ing"
ISSUE 1 | 2020 • BICYCLING.COM 21