It's interesting watching some Chinese Amazon alphabet soup companies take off into premium pricing and others just disappear. I have a Lamtto unit that's fine, cost me $130 or similar, though a quick peek at their Amazon store suggests they no longer sell waterproof units for motorcycles. There are a dozen other random collections of letters that will, though, for a similar price. No idea if they're all off the same assembly line and the company names are rolled to avoid accumulation of too many bad reviews that drags them below the dreaded 4 star mark.
Aoocci is another one that's graduated from just having an Amazon store to having their own webpage, but aren't charging the Chigee premium just yet. I know they did a lot of YouTube influencer freebie marketing a while back, no idea if they were as slimy as Carpuride.
If you want something that's a whole step up, both in quality and price, I have heard nothing but good things about Carpe Iter. The name appears to veer dangerously close to yet another alphabet soup name, but it actually Latin for 'seize the journey' (as opposed to carpe diem, seize the day). It also makes me think of 'carpet eater', which I suspect isn't the connection they were hoping for, what with rugs, munchers, etc.
The main reasons I use it over just a phone mount are as follows:
- It's much bigger, making gloved screen tapping less of a crapshoot (it's still a crapshoot, but now takes three taps to get what I want instead of 10)
- It's brighter, so much more visible on a sunny day
- Having a phone handset on max brighness destroys the battery, so you need to plug it in anyway
- No worries about vibration destroying the camera
- No worries about the phone falling off over a pothole etc
- Phone is always with me, no need to plug/unplug every time I walk away from the bike
- It's just 'there' and auto-connects to my phone, so I just have to jump on and go. No futzing with connecting, plugging in, etc.
- As mentioned by GG above, if I have a bad day and am crawling out of a ditch, the phone is both marginally more likely to survive and I'm not kicking through grass looking for it
The drawbacks so far are:
- Direction changes on the map apps can be laggy. Not sure if it's because the phone is vertical in my pocket so the internal compass isn't accurate, but it seems to take a second or two to reflect a direction change on the map. Normally not a big deal, but can make you think twice when you're making a few turns in quick succession
- It kind of looks like a big phone, so I've had a Toronto junkie damage the mount trying to yank it off before realising it's got no resale value when the bike was parked on the street. It's hard to remove, so taking it off when away from the bike isn't realistic.
- It's not pretty and kind of dominates the triple clamp area.
- The Lamtto unit is clearly disposable. I will be shocked if it survives more than four or five years.
- To be truly useful for motorcycle journeys, they work best with a dedicated routing app, the best of which aren't free. I'm making do with the free version of OsmAnd, but it's kind of a pain. If I did lots of multi-day trips, I'd definitely pony up for My-Route, the paid OsmAnd, or similar. Google Maps is great for the fastest direct route to a destination, but it's terrible for waypoints.
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