Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

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I tried the same thing on my motorbike in London. I had a pretty cheap android phone at the time.

The 'headphone hearing protection' would make the volume too quiet to hear over the engine any time you jiggled the headphone jack. Required a screen interaction to fix.

Of course if you didn't hear the audio prompt or couldn't make it out precisely, you're on your own - no way to check it or get it to repeat if the phone's in your pocket.

Cheap rain-proof phone holders have a zip around the outside - so you can connect wired headphones or a charger - but not both, as they poke out different ends of the phone.

Wired headphones linking you to something linked to your bike make getting on and off complicated.

Motorbikes don't have standard cigarette lighters to plug a standard charger into. You'd have to mess with the bike's wiring to add a phone charger, so I went without.

The battery wasn't good enough to navigate a journey that was 60 minutes each way. Google Maps didn't offer any options like automatically turning off the screen on long straight roads.

Once your phone's in a waterproof holder and you're wearing motorcycling gloves, your touchscreen won't work. So you can't quickly cancel navigation to save battery (or dismiss the hearing protection warning) while stopped at some street lights.

All things considered, it was pretty clear the navigation experience wasn't designed for motorcycling.

This is rather off topic, but does anyone understand how the cigarette lighter plug of all things managed to become more of an international standard than any other electrical outlet (with perhaps USB as an evolving exception)? It's baffeling to me..

Lazy attempt at providing some answers at least: https://www.lifewire.com/car-cigarette-lighter-12v-socket-53....

Excerpt:

Although they weren’t originally designed with this purpose in mind, car cigarette lighters provided an opportunity that was simply too good to pass up. Since the actual lighter portion was removable once the coil-and-reel version fell out of use, the receptacle itself provided easy access to power and ground. That allowed for the development of a power plug that could be inserted and removed with no need to permanently wire an accessory into the electrical system of a car.

The ANSI/SAE J563 specification was developed to ensure compatibility between cigarette lighter receptacles and 12V power plugs made by different manufacturers.

The simple answer is: smoking. Ubiquitous for quite some time and literally addicting. Now that everyone has Facebook on their phablets (arguably addicting) the market has met demand by adding USB ports.

Every car has had one since at least the 60s, and if you wanted easy access to 12VDC, that was your option. Step 2 is network effect, and now it's a "standard".

There were the Hella plugs [0] in old Volkswagens (our '81 Vanagon has one), looked much like a lighter plug but smaller, and a better design. But they never seemed to have caught on except on BMW motorcycles. In fact, whenever I hear a reference to them, they're called "BMW plugs" because that's the only thing that uses them anymore.

[0] http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/291040452525-0-1/s-l1000.jpg

Use Bluetooth helmet speakers for audio.

Most touring bikes, and many scooters have a cigarette lighter attachment point. My SH300 has one in the glove box. The 2016+ VFR800 has one. Etc.

Many better quality gloves have conductive tips on their forefingers for capacitive touchscreen usage these days. My Alpinestars SP8 gloves do.

I find Google Maps audio directions just barely acceptable for London navigation. I prefer my Garmin Zumo, but only use that if my destination is a long way off the big city-crossing roads I otherwise know reasonably well.

It comes with my when I have planned routes, rather than destinations, though. Google Maps is dreadful for planning a route with waypoints - it needs constant interaction at every stage.

Yes, many of my problems could have been at least partly solved by spending more money on a helmet with bluetooth, more money on a bike with a better battery and a phone power supply, more money on better gloves with special finger coating, more money on a phone with a better battery and better handlebar mounts available, and so on.

Sadly, as a student on a £300 motorbike, I didn't have the money for such luxuries :)

I have to disagree. I don't have a helmet with bluetooth. My bike has a standard battery. The phone power supply is a 10 euro part on eBay and 5 minutes of soldering. You don't need the gloves as you shoudln't be touching your devices while riding. The battery on my phone has 1500 loadcycles and plain sucks, but I have the 10 euro phone charger. And a handlebar mount is another 10 euro on eBay.

I guess I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing?

I said I couldn't hear audio directions, barrkel said a bluetooth helmet would have helped, I said maybe but I couldn't afford that, you say you disagree and your helmet doesn't have bluetooth - what are we disagreeing about?

That you need all those things you listed in your post. I do intercontinental trips without most of those things. You only need to invest 20 to 100 euro and about 30 minutes of your time to have proper navigation on your motorcycle.

Wireless Bluetooth earbuds cost about €10 and should fit even with a regular helmet.

If you have cheap earbuds that don't really seal out the other noise, this is a recipe for serious hearing damage.

Sealing out external noise when riding a bike is probably even more dangerous. Just keep the volume down and accept that sometimes it'll get drown out. Most apps repeat the directions anyway.

Depends on the bike - touring bikes like my BMW and the big Triumphs have sockets, mine has the DIN socket and it's easy to get a USB adapter for it. Not exactly the perfect bike for London, but I did commute on it for a year or so, using a RAM mount with waterproof holder. My gloves had conductive fingertips but they stopped being conductive after a while. Meh. The old touchscreens worked better.

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