Tech Review - Is This the Killer Digital Detox Flip Phone?

Introduction

I don’t suppose I need to describe at length what “digital detox” is … surely the national dialogue around this is as ubiquitous as, well, phone addiction. According to this Pew survey, “As smartphones and other internet-connected devices have become more widespread, 31% of U.S. adults now report that they go online ‘almost constantly,’ up from 21% in 2015.” The idea that we could wean ourselves is attractive (particularly since tech companies are fighting any regulation of their products, such as modifications to make them less addictive). An article in the New York Times nicely summarizes our own role in this addiction:

In reality, [the writer Oliver] Burkeman said, whatever you’re working on triggers an unpleasant emotion in you — perhaps boredom, or fear of not being able to complete the task at hand, or concern about not having enough time. You take refuge in your phone in order to escape those uncomfortable feelings.

Another Times article, wherein the author describes her month-long switch to a basic flip phone to fight her own online excesses, recounts that “after about two weeks, I noticed I’d lost my ‘thumb twitch’ — a physical urge to check my phone in the morning, at red lights, waiting for an elevator or at any other moment when my mind had a brief opportunity to wander.”

I have recently purchased and set up what I think might be the perfect flip phone for breaking the cycle of constant phone use while still keeping some of the core features of smartphones that people really do rely on. If you’re considering the switch, or (better yet!) choosing a flip-style phone as your teenager’s first, or would like to know the state of the art in flip phones in case addiction becomes a problem for your or a friend or family member, read on for a full review.

But first…

Full disclosure: I didn’t buy this phone for myself. (I know, that sounds about as authentic as “I’m asking for a friend.”) I will confess that I struggle somewhat to limit my own smartphone use, and do fall prey to the pitfall of unlocking my phone to obtain one piece of information (e.g., current pollen count, since my eyes are itchy) only to see something on my screen that drags me into another investigation (e.g., has the Times approved my bagel comment yet?) and before I know it I’m snared in some article and only when I’ve finally freed myself do I realize—with a stab of remorse—that I can’t remember why I unlocked my phone in the first place.

Whew! That was a long aside considering I was trying to explain why I myself don’t actually need  to switch to a flip phone. I guess I trust in my own discipline to mitigate my usage of this troublesome tool. I fancy myself to be like the well-trained dog that will let the milk bone balance on my snout for as long as it takes for my master to say, “Okay, now Waldo!” except that I’m both the dog and the master (or at least think I am).

The fact is, I bought the flip phone for my younger daughter, who (as I explained in a previous post) wants nothing to do with the always-online, phone-addicted social media realm. (She needed to upgrade from her extremely dumb brick-style phone to something more durable, and thought with a flip phone at least the screen would be protected.) It strikes me that a phone that cannot addict the user in the first place must surely be the same phone that a recovering addict would benefit from.

(So why didn’t my daughter choose her flip phone herself? Because she doesn’t care. Part of choosing a phone is caring about it and geeking out over the selection process, and she can’t be bothered. She’d as soon clean out the cat box as buy a phone, and just as I’m the one who shares an office with the cat box—my daughters having fled the coop—I’m the guy who handles the IT headaches for the family.)

What does a flip phone really need?

Obviously this post wouldn’t have any purpose if all flip phones were interchangeable. But they’re not. Some are quite expensive (kind of lame when you’re looking for minimal capabilities) and some lack the features we may really need in a pinch. Here are the characteristics I think a flip phone should have:

• Voice service that actually works – ideally WiFi calling and 4G LTE
• Basic texting ability – but not more than that
• Decent battery life – ought to be a strong suit for a flip phone
• Lack of a full keyboard – a key component (pun intended, sorry) of making it hard to use
• Nonstandard operating system – removes you from the universe of time-sucking apps
• Pronounced lack of good games – because life is too short
• A basic camera – useful for informational snapshots
• A music player – because nobody has a standalone MP3 player anymore
• GPS – because let’s face it, modern man has lost the ability to navigate

The phone I eventually selected for my daughter, the Nokia 2780, has all this—and more! (And no, I’m not getting any kind of compensation from Nokia, which I would be required to disclose. And while I’m being parenthetical, don’t try to buy this phone from Amazon. Their janky seller strung me along for weeks and never actually shipped anything. I got it from Best Buy with no hassle, and no, they didn’t give me a kickback either.)

So here is how the 2780 stacks up in terms of my wish list.

The basics

First of all, this phone is cheap: about $100 including tax. It also has a nice form factor … compact but not too stingy, and the lid flips up with a satisfying spring (like a communicator from the original Star Trek), which pleases me. Here’s the closed-up view.

And here it is flipped open (cat included for scale). It’s easy to cradle this on your neck like we used to do with landline phones.

Voice service

Part of the point of a flip phone is to return to the good old days of talking live to another human … it’s not supposed to turn us into hermits. (Quite the opposite, in fact.) This Nokia works as a phone and sounds great. Oddly, it doesn’t seem to have a speakerphone feature, but it has great hands-free options that I’ll get into later. It supports 4G LTE, which you don’t find on all dumb phones these days, and this is important because the major carriers are shutting down their 3G networks. Best of all, this phone supports WiFi calling, which is a godsend indoors where cellular signals often don’t carry well.

Basic texting ability

You can send and receive basic texts on this phone (though the typing is clunky, as I’ll get to in a moment), and you can even send and receive pictures (which true SMS texting apps, such as found on very dumb phones, cannot). This is arguably semi-important because so many people still want to send you a photo and who wants to be a party pooper? But fear not, there’s a limit to the nonsense; GIF images come through but only as static images.

Battery life

I didn’t run a full battery of tests (pun intended, couldn’t resist) like CNET would, but I ran this thing hard (configuring, exploring, making test calls, adding contacts, etc.) and it did fine, with half its battery left after about half a day of use. Thus, a charge should last at least a full day, and the battery will probably do great on standby, though I doubt it’ll last for weeks like with truly old-school phones. There’s a configurable low-battery mode, and you can choose if and when to automatically switch to it. One nice feature is the USB-C charging port, because USB-A is no longer cute and we’re finally starting to get rid of all those old chargers.

Something else to consider is that this phone doesn’t have any modern A.I. capabilities, which saves energy beyond the phone’s own battery. ChatGPT, according to a Google query I just ran, uses over half a million kilowatts a day, which could power 180,000 US households. And ChatGPT uses over half a liter of water (i.e., more than a pint) just to write a 100-word email. This phone, by eschewing such stuff, is certainly greener.

Lack of a full keyboard

Let’s face it, typing with only nine keys (e.g., hitting the 2 key once for A, twice for B, three times for C, or four times for 2) is a pain in the neck, and will stop you in your tracks if you start to tell your entire life story in a text message. So instead of sending and receiving 20 texts about when and where to meet a friend, you’ll just make a one-minute phone call, and in the process you’ll get to hear your friend’s voice and remind her how convenient talking is.

The Nokia 2780 offers a particularly good (i.e., bad) implementation of 9-key typing. It tries to emulate smartphones by employing, by default, predictive typing, where you get far enough into a word that it can guess, and suggest, the rest. This works great on a smartphone—and not at all on this phone. I tried to type “hi” by hitting the 4 key twice, to get the H, but the stupid phone decided I wanted a word starting with G and suggested words like gig and gee. There was no way to stop it from assuming G was the first letter; I could not make it understand I wanted a word starting with H. Since “hi” must be one of the most frequent opening words of any text thread, it’s particularly frustrating that you can only get G-words. What useful words start with G? Gig? Gigolo? Giraffe? What’s worse, when you turn off predictive typing, this silly phone doesn’t remember your preference. You have to turn off predictive typing again every time you type.

As someone who appreciates a well-conceived, elegant user interface, I’m completely appalled. But as someone who knows how beguiling texting can be, and how oddly fast a human can get at typing with nine keys, I absolutely love this. It’s like the poison pill, damning any tendency the user might have to conduct non-voice communications.

Nonstandard operating system

This Nokia runs on KaiOS, a proprietary (yay!) platform that nobody, I mean nobody, is writing apps for. This is like a giant firewall protecting the user from giving in, again and again, and installing this or that single-purpose app, like so many appliances cluttering up the kitchen counter. My own smartphone has almost 200 apps, even though I feel like I truly do try to limit them. To not have the Apple or Android OS is the singular feature—the absolute minimum characteristic—required to really call this a digital detox phone.

That said, the phone does have a web browser. This could be a deal-breaker for those trying to live only in the real world, except that the browser works pretty poorly, thank goodness. It’s just useable enough that the user could go to a mobile-optimized website, such as Blogger, and do some light reading while, say, stuck in a line. This sometimes really comes in handy for me, when I somehow end up waiting around for half an hour and forgot to bring a book. And reading good stuff is a lot different from getting dragged into TikTok or something.

One nontrivial use for a simple browser would be the ability to check in for a flight and download the boarding pass with its QR code. This is really handy when you’ve traveled to some place where you don’t have access to a printer, and don’t want to have to print your boarding pass at the airport. It’s also nice to do a quick search for, say, a good taqueria when you’re traveling.

I regret to inform you that the 2780 does have Instagram. I didn’t set that up, needless to say, because just like me, my daughter wants nothing to do with it or any other social media platform, but at least I can say this CNET reviewer found the Insta experience highly lacking on this phone, complaining that “the interface was squished and its cursor was laggy as well” and “the quality wasn’t great.” Whew! The 2780 dodged a bullet there. (This reviewer concluded that using this phone made her “anxious” and “very uncomfortable” because her smartphone is like “an adult pacifier,” and instead of this being a wake-up call she concluded that she’s “more attached to [her] iPhone 15 Pro Max than ever,” which I find defeatist and a bit depressing. But then, as a CNET writer she can’t exactly become a neo-Luddite anyway.)

Pronounced lack of good games

This phone offers Snake, which (like all games) I’ve never played, but it looks pretty damn boring to me:

There are other games, but they look childish and clunky and how could they not be, when the screen is so small and lo-res?

At least a user who indulges in these games to escape his thoughts will feel extra foolish. It also appears that downloading new games would be impossible; presumably there’s no KaiOS equivalent of an App Store or Play Store, or if there is it’s limited and lame.

Basic camera

The camera on this phone is decent, which is to say totally lame compared to the highly advanced (and yet absurdly flawed) cameras on modern smartphones. The point here isn’t to get amazing photos that will wow your friends, but to get a snapshot to capture information. For example, you’re starting a hike and want a shot of the trail map, or you just parked your car and want to quickly record the location. And if you’re a middle-aged person with failing eyesight, it’s also a good enough camera to photograph a menu, so you can zoom in on it. The camera even supports video with sound (again, mainly so you can get a picture of something and easily attach contextual narrative). But you won’t be tempted to turn your life into a real-time photo chronicle, which I imagine your friends and family will (secretly) appreciate.

Music player

This might not seem like a big deal, but honestly, it’s nice to have music, which is really not the kind of distraction we’re trying to avoid. Menial tasks like housekeeping are a lot more tolerable with background music, and less intrusive, in my opinion, than podcasts. We all paid good money for MP3 players back in the day, and just because you’re forsaking your smartphone doesn’t mean you should have to carry around two devices (even if you could find your old iPod).

This phone has a really great music player, which not only organizes your MP3 files but includes the album artwork:

The point of those funky earbuds shown in the photo above is that this phone supports Bluetooth, so you can have great quality sound from your favorite earbuds or speaker. There’s an old-school 3.5mm jack if you’re looking to use, say, your kickass Sennheiser HD 800 S over-ear headphones. Now, in terms of storage, this phone has a micro-SD slot that will take up to a 32 GB card, which should be plenty. And it’s easy to install and configure the extra storage.

In addition to the MP3 player, this phone has an FM radio, and the app is pretty nicely designed (e.g., it automatically finds all the stations in your area and you can save your favorites). Oddly, you cannot use the radio with Bluetooth—it requires you to plug in wired earbuds or headphones. I suspect this is because it relies on them for reception, like an ersatz antenna. Perhaps you still have decent old-school earbuds lying around and won’t have to settle for the crap earbuds the airline gave you (if it even did).

GPS & Google Maps

As we all know, depression is increasing among men. I have a pet theory that part of the cause of this is that men never provide or receive directions anymore. By my non-scientific rough estimate, as recently as the ‘80s navigation represented at least half of all dialogue between males. We’d yack incessantly about not only the best route to take somewhere, but about what route we just took and how well that worked out for us. Now, Google Maps and their GPS-connected ilk, by knowing and sharing the single best route at any moment in time, have made this entire conversational topic unnecessary. GPS is like the opposite of a men extender. It reduces about half of our utility overall … no wonder we’re suffering.

Mental health epidemiology aside, the result of this ubiquitous technology is that if you ask for directions, you probably won’t get them anymore because mankind has now entirely lost the ability to navigate. You’ll just get a shrug which means, “I dunno, just use GPS.” (I try to offer directions sometimes and get the same shrug.) So what happens when you are doing digital detox and have forsaken your smartphone? Well, at least this phone has GPS and Google Maps, with all its essential functionality (e.g., you can search by business name without having to know the address). It’s not going to be that easy to use, and I’m certainly not recommending you try to squint at the 2780’s screen while driving, but you can at least review the route in advance and/or hand the phone to your passenger. (See? This phone encourages carpooling, another win for the planet!)

In case privacy is one of your motivations for choosing a flip phone, I’m happy to report that it’s easy, with this phone, to tell the app not to share your travel history with Google.

Extras

So does this phone have anything I wouldn’t want or need? Or that I didn’t realize I needed? Well, it does support email. I’m not sure how easy this would be to configure, and surely not all providers are supported, but I’ll bet you could fetch your Gmail on it.

This might not be a bad thing … the inability to check for an email you’re expecting might be distracting, though how far this goes could interfere with your detox. At least you won’t be tempted to reply via your phone, since its 9-key predictive typing is so gloriously clumsy and slow.

There’s one other feature I didn’t expect to see: a news app.

Such is my antipathy for algorithm-fueled Internet news, especially during election season, I didn’t even launch this app to try it out. I can only hope it’s the worst user experience ever conceived of for a phone, because if doomscrolling is convenient with the Nokia 2780, the terrorists (i.e., Big Tech) have already won.

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Epic France Trans Alps Cycling Trip - Part II

Introduction

If you’ve been on albertnet lately, you’ll have learned that I recently did a week-long, fully supported bicycle tour through southeast France, tackling most of the Alpine climbs that are included in Tour de France routes. You’ll also have learned that I tend to get sidetracked by culinary matters, which is great news for those who tire of cycling lore. Well, I’m back, and this time promise to focus more on the suffering—mine in particular (your favorite!). As before, this report doesn’t have a very specific structure … it’s more like a highlights reel, because there were just too many rides, too many climbs, and too many meals to worry about sequencing them properly.

Navigation

I’m really bad at navigation. I don’t have much of an explorer’s curiosity, and am happy to keep riding the same training routes over and over again. Even when I did a nine-month bike tour with my wife, we made literally zero effort to plot any kind of route—we just started by heading south along the California coast almost to Mexico, then went randomly east or north until we got to Maine. Let’s be clear though: It’s not just that I’m not interested in navigation, it’s that I lack the mental faculty for it. So my biggest fear with this French Alps tour was that I’d get dropped and then get lost, in this strange foreign land where you can’t even get a normal cup of coffee.

Hoping to have my fears assuaged, I asked K, our supported-tour veteran, if getting dropped would necessarily mean getting lost. His reply was emphatic: “If you don’t download the GPX files, you will definitely get lost.” D’oh!

This is kind of a classic pitfall of modern society: you’re expected to be an expert in the latest technology whether you like it or not. Events and itineraries are now communicated via social media—never mind that these vanity platforms were originally designed solely to increase teenagers’ insecurity. Case in point: the bike tour organizers took to sending important schedule updates via WhatsApp, a platform I do not, and shall not, use. On top of all this, I’m suddenly supposed to know what a GPX file is …. presumably it runs on a Garmin (i.e., one of the expensive gizmos I don’t own).

Well, I found the email with all the routes, downloaded a GPX file, tried to open it on my phone, and was offered two apps to try. One of them I hadn’t heard of, but the other was (surprise!) an app I actually use. It’s Sigma Ride, the workout tracking app for my cheap, weird bike computer that nobody else in America has. Well, the GPX file opened right up, which was a pleasant surprise but not that helpful. After all, it’s not like I want to ride around the Alps peering into my phone the whole time. On a whim, I clicked a three-dot icon and saw an option to beam the route into my bike computer via Bluetooth. And, voilà! There it was, the route loaded in my bike computer so it could give me step-by-step directions … a feature I was vaguely aware it might have but had never before investigated. Sweet! Now I could totally get dropped and all I had to worry about was everyone snickering at my frailty behind my back! (You know, the devil I know…)

Col de Joux Plane and Col de la Columbière

I don’t remember much about our first climb of the day, Cat 1 Col de Joux Plane, other than we started up it immediately, with like zero warm-up. That’s okay, because I was raring to go after a great night’s sleep. Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. Actually I hadn’t slept for shit, between jet lag, the room being too warm, anxiety about the big day of riding, etc. Plus, my older daughter phoned me in the middle of the night. Why? Well, my phone had gone berserk and had been texting and re-texting her my Wordle result and some trip photos almost continuously, all night, creating the illusion I was awake and insane and already on my phone. At least, that’s what led my daughter to forget the time zone difference. My roommate was oddly gracious about the whole thing; turns out he was wide awake at the time anyway. I’m not the only one having trouble sleeping.

Anyway, the pace on the Joux Plane was fine. The photo above is from early in the climb. The first descent was beautiful and fast and fun, and my rented Felt FR road bike handled very well—so if you stumbled on this blog by searching on “Felt FR,” and are this close to buying that bike, and don’t mind a 73-degree seat tube angle instead of 72, well, shoot, just go ahead and buy it. It’s a good bike that does not hesitate to dive right into the curves.

Near the base of the Hors Categorie (i.e., “too difficult to even categorize”) Col de la Columbière, as if in some kind of harmonic convergence, my East Bay Velo Club teammates Craig and Ian and I all had to pee at the same moment. (As far as you know, we dutifully used a public restroom and any photo you may have seen of any less responsible behavior was surely Photoshopped.) Following this stop we found ourselves off the back of the group, which by this point had pretty much split apart into tiny clumps, pairs, and individuals. We passed them all, like in one of those car race video games. It was super fun. Craig paced Ian and me, which is bog standard for all the rides we do, as though Craig were our super-domestique … except that in the end he always sails off into the sunset instead of us.

Sure enough, about three kilometers from the Columbière summit, where the climb gets particularly hard, Craig accidentally dropped me. He would never, ever attack; it’s just that he forgets how limited my endurance truly is, and after all he doesn’t have eyes in the back of his head. Sometimes he realizes I’m gapped and he holds up, but other times I’m too far back and just does his own thing. It’s kind of like a cat playing with a snake, and not realizing he’s actually killed it, and then he wonders why the snake isn’t very much fun anymore.

Guideposts

Did you notice something just now? Something very odd for albertnet? Like, how I used the metric system to specify the distance from the summit? Nice catch. As you know from this post, I’m a proponent of the imperial system of measurement, even if this puts me at odds with the entire scientific community. Well, I haven’t renounced those views; it’s just that in the very specific context of Alpine mountain passes, kilometers have their place. It’s because of these cool guideposts you’ll see on every major climb:

If you click to zoom on the above image you’ll note that that sign gives all kinds of info. It gives the name of the climb (which, believe it or not, you can forget if you’ve targeted several in a day and are severely oxygen-deprived); the distance to the summit in kilometers; the current altitude (alas, in meters, which is still not so useful to me since I can’t do simple arithmetic under physical duress); and the average percent grade for the next kilometer. This info is generally very useful (though at times it can seem to be taunting me, like when the end of a climb seems to never come). Do I wish all this info were in imperial units? Well, almost, except that, kilometers being shorter than miles, this arrangement obviously gives me more signs to look at, and a better sense of progress. So I’ll accept this use of kilometer as the exception that proves the rule.

On the final climb, the Category 1 Col de la Croix Fry, Craig and I encountered some lovely cows, bells a-jangling:

I still had great legs on this final climb of the day, which was so satisfying, I cannot tell you. As I said, I’d worried about not keeping up, and embarrassing myself, and trying the patience of my pals and other Epic A riders, but this is not at all what was happening. My legs were totally up to the job. This surprised me because I knew I hadn’t trained enough for this trip. I just can’t seem to carve out enough time, and I’m getting too old to simply wing it—at least, that’s what I’d assumed, only to end up riding just fine. But this satisfaction with my fitness wasn’t only about ageing well. Let’s just say the last couple of years have been hard on me, so to be doing something bloody difficult, but with aplomb, gave me renewed faith in my whole self (even if my competence is in the largely useless realm of amateur cycling). The scenery was pretty glorious, too.

After a sweet, sweeping descent to our next hotel, and a giant snack there involving cured meats, we wandered around the little town of La Clusaz and noted their brilliant open-air market. Check out what you can get from this little vender:

Not to be unpatriotic or anything, but this sight reinforced my growing sense that farmers’ markets in America are a joke. I think that, as with factory outlet stores, farmers’ markets started off well—an actual farmer could sell truly local, fresh produce directly to consumers—but then morphed into a sham when deeply cynical minds realized that once people had latched on to an idea, they’d pursue it indefinitely regardless of whether there was any value in it. So we have people setting up tables at these farmers’ markets with produce they just bought somewhere (which is sometimes still in someone else’s packaging!) and then they actually mark it up because the farmers’ market seems like a “premium” experience that is worth paying extra for. Sheesh.

Bad weather!

Oh, man, the forecast for the third day was not promising: a 93% chance of rain from 5 a.m. through late afternoon. Sure enough, it was already raining when we woke up, and raining when we rolled out. What a grind. I don’t have a good rain jacket, for the simple reason that—as documented here—I don’t ride in the rain. What I do have is this big puffy thing that doesn’t breathe very well, doesn’t wad up small enough to easily fit in a jersey pocket, and isn’t really waterproof. I think of it as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Jacket.

Perhaps halfway up the Cat 3 Col des Aravis the rain let up somewhat, and I had a nice time riding by a lot of cows, their standard-issue bells making the usual pleasant racket.

The respite didn’t last, and on the Cat 2 Col des Saisies, K and I rode through a downpour of biblical proportions, the rain drumming on our helmets and jackets, the road completely flooding. You know how when you’re in a car wash, you sometimes get the sensation of the car rolling forward though you know it isn’t? Same deal: the water rushing past my wheels gave me the illusion of hauling ass up the mountain until I lifted my gaze again. I wish I had photos and videos of this, but of course you can never get that footage … you’re too busy suffering and shivering. There was thunder and lightning, and K wisecracked about opportunistically riding next to me so he’d never be the tallest object.

Here’s a photo of the summit, where the rain had finally let up. K and I are offering our gratitude, or at least a photo op, to Saint Anne, whom we took from this shrine to be the patron saint of travelers. Turns out (based on some very light research) she’s actually the patron saint of unmarried women, housewives, and women in labor. Whatever.

We warmed up at the van, scarfing Cokes, cookies, fruit, chocolate milk, and of course cured meats. We had a decently dry descent and, during a brief stop at one of those darling French villages, stashed our rain gear in the van for the climb.

We began the final climb up the Hors Categorie Col du Pré. Halfway up, the skies got darker again, and Craig and Ian fetched their (slim, scrunch-able, actually waterproof) jackets from the van to have on hand. I decided to take my chances (which gave me the opportunity to noodle on ahead). The climb was a lot of fun. It’s a gorgeous road with a lot of super steep pitches.

The sky grew increasingly tenebrous as we climbed.

The climb went on and on.

This could have been a great photo if the smartphone camera software weren’t so janky:

I mean, look at how small Ian looks compared to Craig—like a dwarf or something! Craig’s head looks as tall as Ian’s torso! And Craig’s front wheel looks way larger than his rear. What is this nonsense? This is why you want a real camera.

With 4km to go, I got my last photo from the Col de Pré … after this, the skies opened up and the rain just absolutely pummeled us. I was soaked to the skin. At the summit, we piled into the van and went through our backpacks of warm gear. Ian had an extra jersey for me, and after some discussion four of us, plus the guide, decided to forge ahead on the descent while the rest of the crew went down in the van. It was a frigid descent, rain flowing over the road like a water slide at a theme park. A road construction crew, decked out like stormtroopers, stared at us dumbfounded. Ian, riding a bike with rim brakes, eventually thought better of the whole enterprise and pulled off to the side to be picked up. When we reached the town down in the valley, the rain showed no signs of letting up, and Craig reported, with fascination, that my lips were completely blue. With only a relatively unexciting flat run-in to the hotel ahead, we bagged it and climbed in the van. The heater was blasting in there. By the time we got to the hotel we’d all been basically poached alive in our wet gear. I hope there are no pets in the cargo hold of this aircraft, proximate to my luggage, as I make my way home. I have never before encountered such stinky cycling gear, and that’s saying something.

Brides-les-Bains

We lodged at a strange health spa type hotel in Brides-les-Bains. This is where unhealthy people with unhealthy lifestyles go to get cured by the special waters and various spa treatments, so that they can enjoy robust health going forward without changing any of their unhealthy behaviors. Several of these guests regarded us with a bit of the ol’ stink-eye, as if deeply suspicious of our very presence at their spa.

This place had those fancy outward-facing elevators that are like glass cylinders so you can watch the world go by during your vertical trip. They were also among the slowest elevators I’ve ever encountered, with disconcerting juddering at times. Most interesting of all was the sound they made: think of a giant, like the one atop Jack’s beanstalk, groaning, combined with the sound of a whale calling out across the ocean. The noise was nearly constant. At the request of my wife I’ve attempted to recreate the sound:

Dinner got off to a good start, with a salad that was like 70% Serrano ham.

The entrée, though, was a bit on the small and non-starchy side:

The menu described this as “Veal nut with its juice.” Needless to say, this led to all kinds of sophomoric humor (“testicle of a young bull, with…”). The dessert, or “desert” as the menu called it, was a peach clafoutis, which I guess was supposed to be like a cobbler but was practically frozen. We’d have starved except the very good bread was plentiful (though still bereft of butter or olive oil). But then, breakfast the next morning featured the excellent pastries we’d come to rely on, so no harm done.

At every breakfast I had a croissant and a pain au chocolat, sometimes two, along with a big bowl of cereal, some eggs, cured meats, cheeses, and yogurt. This is how I managed to gain four pounds in a week—the same week I rode almost 400 miles and climbed almost 60,000 feet. God bless these Alpine cows and all the butter they make possible.

To be continued…

Well, that seems like enough for this round. I’m getting cold just remembering all this. Check back soon because I’ll be reporting on the Col de la Loze, which is considered the hardest climb in the entire Alps; the famous Col de la Madeleine; and the absolutely brutal Col du Glandon. And of course I’ll describe our caloric intake as well, to include one of the weirdest and French-est dinners I’ve ever had.

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Biketronics II

Introduction

This post is not about e-bikes (i.e., battery-assisted bicycles). I have a lot to say on that topic, actually, but that’s for another day. This also isn’t about electronic shifting; I cover that here and here. This post is about bike computers.

More than twelve years ago in these pages, I posted Biketronics, a survey of these handlebar-mounted computers (and related technologies like heart rate monitors, power meters, etc.). That was a surprisingly popular post. So, having recently purchased the fanciest (and perhaps wackiest) of these devices I’ve ever had, a Sigma Sport Rox 4.0 with GPS capabilities, I figured we could go another round. My every instinct tells me this is a terrible topic and that nobody could possibly be interested, but then I’ve been wrong before. (For example, my post on the spelling of “kindergartner” is now one of my most popular of all time.) So here we go. I’ll throw some totally unrelated gags in here and there just in case your interest flags.

By the way, a lot has changed since my original Biketronics post. Back then, of the fifty-two cycling pals I surveyed, only five were using GPS-equipped devices. Now virtually all my friends have GPS. So I’ll devote some focus to that.

Who even uses Sigma Sport?

Nobody uses Sigma Sport bike computers, at least in this country. I literally don’t know a soul who has one, except one guy in Germany. I had to order mine from some outfit in Spain. So why did I choose Sigma Sport? Well, Garmins are too popular, same with Wagoo or Wayco or Woohoo or whatever that other popular brand is. I don’t want to be like everyone else. Besides, I’m a cheap bastard, and all the modern GPS-enabled models are at least a couple hundred bucks. No thanks.

Besides, look at the loads of features you get with the Rox 4.0:

Sure, lots of modern bike computers have power meters built in, but how many have pierced earrings? You might say “plenty,” but you’re not paying attention: pierced ears are popular, but pierced earrings? Those are hard to come by. And I love the existential air of “protective seals removed and cannot be.” These seals, these seals … they cannot be!

I also wanted a Sigma Sport because my old one served me well. It looked outdated the day I bought it, and certainly had its quirks, but it featured a groovy lap timer that would enable me to easily see the time, distance, and heart rate of my favorite climbs after the fact. Alas, the plastic bits enabling that computer to snap into the handlebar mount started to wear out to the point that I had to rubber-band it in place.

That wasn’t foolproof either so eventually I epoxied it to the mount, meaning once the battery dies I’m probably screwed—plus I can’t move it from bike to bike. So I wasn’t in a hurry to replace the computer, but it needed to be done.

I sense your interest waning—I know mine is—so here are a few good names for a rock band:

Duck Husband

Repetitive Stress Disorder

Nipple Confusion

Loofa Harvest

Good thing I wasn’t in a rush, because the new computer took forever to arrive. Tracking the shipment online was like trying to measure continental drift. It made its way across Europe in not much more than a week, but then was stuck in the Netherlands for twelve days. I emailed support and the retailer wrote, in an incredibly long, mostly boilerplate email, “Your parcel is currently on its way and it is due to be delivered to you very soon… Based on our experience, Customs can take between 15-60 days to unblock your parcel and proceed with delivery.”

Rox 4.0 documentation

I never did manage to find a complete list of specifications for this computer, even on the Sigma Sport website, so I guess I can’t complain that it didn’t come with a complete owner’s manual either. There was a nice thick booklet, but it’s only thick because it’s in ten languages, including Czechoslovakian and Polish. (I guess I should be grateful English is even among them.) The manual is actually just a “quick guide,” with a QR code for the “detailed instructions” web page which is mostly just little videos that cover only what is in the quick guide. There are no instructions anywhere, for example, on how to sync the computer to the heart rate monitor strap.

Here’s an example of the quick guide quirkiness:

“Active” and “Auto-Pause” aren’t actually defined. You start a workout by pressing the big button, and stop it the same way, and there’s actually a way to tell the state (running vs. stopped) on the screen—but the instructions don’t tell you what it is! And why are these “most important settings” anything you’d want to mess with during training? Think about it: you’re in the middle of a workout, hopefully not in the middle of a fast descent, and suddenly you think, “I need to calibrate the altimeter!” Why would you think this? And, if you wanted to manually set the altitude, how would you even know what altitude you’re at, other than to check the altimeter that’s right in front of you? Okay, maybe you’ve reached an elevation sign, but a) are those really common enough to make this among the most important settings, and b) why would you trust the sign, which is after all placed wherever it’s convenient to dig a hole, over a device that auto-calibrates itself via GPS, with an easy way to true itself up? It makes no sense.

First ride

I set out on the first ride with the new computer without having messed with the display settings. The display is highly configurable, which is pretty cool, but of the thirty touted functions, not all can be included in your configuration. That is, you have to choose your favorites. I figured while I was getting my feet wet, I’d just go with the factory configuration. I didn’t have any heart rate data because I searched too long in vain to learn how to set that up and was running out of daylight.

The first thing I noticed was a compass, which is nifty but totally needless because I seldom journey anywhere. There was also this weird directional arrow that seemed to point around randomly. Descending Wildcat Canyon Road, I noticed my speed fluctuating quite a bit, which you’d expect with GPS due to the satellite signal being blocked by tree cover, etc., but I had paid extra for the wheel sensor, so this shouldn’t have happened. Kind of annoying, but whatever … I was enjoying the big bold letters on the display, anyway.

But then, about ten miles into my ride, I noticed the mileage only read five miles. WTF?! Was this thing a total piece of crap, unable to actually measure distance? But the duration looked correct, and the speed (other than the occasional fluctuations) also looked about right, so it wasn’t totally whacked. But then things got even weirder. My confusion became outright bewilderment when the mileage number actually started dropping.

You’re probably just dying to learn the solution to this paradox, but I’m going to interrupt this post with a proposed title for a country & western song:

No one wears a mullet anymore

Two-thirds of my way through the ride, the mileage number was lower than ever, and it just dropped the whole rest of the way. By now you’ve surely figured this out, as I finally did too. The hypothesis I formed a few miles from home proved correct as I rolled down my street and the numbers went from fractions of a mile to matter of feet, and reached almost zero when I hit the driveway. That’s right, the device was showing my distance from home (presumably as the crow flies). So the accuracy was not an issue … but what a weird thing to want to display on your computer. I’m still scratching my head on that one.

The phone app & sharing

My old Sigma Sport uploaded its ride files to my phone over NFC (near-field communication) which was kind of a manual process and took a little while. The new one uses BLE (Bluetooth low-energy) and is swift and automatic. Look at the pretty display of my ride today:

I can share the ride, in Strava-like detail, via a URL to a (presumably) private website, with a much larger map, and I can drag my mouse along the graphs and such. (The units shown here are, alas, metric but I’ve already figured out how to fix that.)

I even figured out how to export these rides into a format that my old Sigma Data Center software can import, so I can still have an unbroken record of my rides going back years. And I think I’ve mastered the various features of this thing (other than integration with komoot, which I may never need).

And now it’s time for a few more rock band names:

Pack Shrapnel

Clear Rectal Discharge

The Harried Parents

Dark Yarn

Now that the Android app and PC software are dialed in, and I know how to operate the computer, the only remaining problem is…

The speed & mileage mystery

I’ve got this fancy sensor mounted on my hub to provide “even greater accuracy,” so why do all the totals for my standard loop come out low? And why does my reported speed suddenly drop from 28 to 14 mph and then pop up to 32? I decided to query my bike team, to see if they have this issue, and if it’s even worth having that sensor on there (since it’s kind of ugly).

Right away, I received replies from six teammates. Two of them actually answered the question (short answer: no difference between GPS and sensor measurement), and the others provided a variety of interesting tidbits:

• The mph display often lags (jumps) while under tree cover, as does the elevation gain/loss. Piece of shit
• The device connects with a satellite. The choice of satellite affects the data. The device usually has a Satellite setting. Galileo is US satellites. GLANOSS is Russian satellites. If you set your device to choose both then supposedly you’ll get more accurate data. (There may be a third set of satellites available now, too.) If you ride a lot in one location, then travel  (like if you ride from Oakland every day then one day start in Sacramento or France) this can confuse the device. The solution is to find the necessary obscure setting and leave it outside for a specified length of time. (Read the instructions. You’re on your own.) The device works better facing certain directions, like north, I think. Something to do with astronomy.
• Dana if you get on Strava all your problems will disappear Do it! Do it! Do it!
• GPS based measurements aren’t perfect. Absolute GPS accuracy is typically in the 5-10 meter range for consumer devices, so the GPS measurement is typically combined with an inertial measurement unit (IMU), which gives accelerations and rate of rotations that are then integrated to get linear and angular velocities using a Kalman filter. This also means that if the GPS signal is degraded due to building or tree, your velocity doesn’t suddenly read zero. Since the IMU in consumer devices generally sucks, it’s not going to be perfect.

Wow, that’s a lot to digest. I for one am not interested in having the Russian government tracking my movements, and I’m not sure which device (the bike computer or my phone) is doing the actual GPS work and would have the necessary obscure calibration setting to true it up. I’m sure I don’t want to start doing northbound-only rides and coming back on a bus or something. Above all else, I think it’s time for some more cool rock band names:

The Incestuous Mollies

The Quasi-Vegans

Leap Smear

Hard Floor Tool

Getting back to my teammates’ feedback, I reckon that the hub-mounted sensor I’m using is indeed the highly sophisticated IMU described, and it’s just not engineered well enough to be that accurate … which is a bit of a shame, since the old-school ones, which had a magnet attached to a spoke that passed by a sensor that counted the wheel rotations, was utterly simple and infallible. Perhaps part of my problem is that I’ve mounted this IMU on the rear hub (so I don’t have to look at it). I have just discovered (via a video buried within its website) that Sigma Sport recommends front hub mounting for “optimum reception.” Is it worth moving it, or do I ditch it entirely? That brings me to my next question.

Does any of this matter?

My friend Craig, who wrote about the IMU, went on to say:

Of course, you never precisely defined what you’re trying to measure. Do you want to know how far the tire patch of your front tire travelled? Or, do you care more about your rear tire patch? Even a rider trying to go in a straight line makes micro adjustments while pedaling, so the front tire travels ~0.25% farther! The more you turn, the greater the difference between the front and rear tire path will be. Or, perhaps you care more about your center of gravity? In that case, every time you rail a corner, your center of gravity takes a route that might be ~1% less (depending on the radius of the turn and your lean) than your rear tire patch. Of course, does it matter? Did you do less work because your new device showed that your ride was 2% shorter?

I think he’s being diplomatic here; the more direct version of his question might be, “Who cares what your mileage and speed are when the bigger question is, when are you going to start training harder so you don’t fall off my wheel when I’m trying to be nice and drag you through a headwind?” And he would have a point.

The answer is, at least in the short term, I want credit for every last foot of my rides because I’m doing a friendly competition called Cycle Around the Globe to raise awareness around the problem of suicide, and to engage in the collaborative effort to help prevent it. (My personal fundraising page is here.) Currently I’m sitting in 15th place with 540 kilometers ridden, though the leader has 14,000 kilometers, which he achieved in a single ride … so I’m guessing he’s not using a consumer-grade IMU. In fact, I think he’s even worse than those mopeds and e-bikes on Strava … he’s just making shit up. But for a good cause!

Lap timer

Alas, there is no lap timer on the Rox 4.0 (even though this very basic feature is available on a $14 Casio watch). I think I know why: the vast majority of cyclists are on Strava, which tells them their time on any segment they could want, automatically. But no, I won’t join Strava. That kind of thing’s not my bag.

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