Originally Posted by
canklecat
This is Texas so it wouldn't do much good to check weather 48 hours in advance. I check before every ride.
This is SoCal, so for 99% of rides, it's a waste of time to check before every ride.
And the weather apps automagically push alerts for my region.
I don't want alerts, that's only for severe weather problems like flash flood warnings etc, they don't make alerts for 'just rain'.
You can buy a really good Amazon Kindle Fire for about $40 right now.
I have a Kindle Fire, got it from my parents xmas 2014. It came with a $25 gift card for apps from the kindle store, we still have about half of that left. It gets used plenty, mostly the kids playing free games, but most of the time when I pick it up it needs charging or is turned off, and getting to the point where I could check the weather is slower than booting up the desktop which has an SSD. And the kindle would be no help out on a ride, even if I could bring it, which I never would.
Regarding the smartphone, I don't even have a data plan for my older iPhone. I just use it to run cycling apps, maps, snap pix and videos when I don't want to carry my full camera kit or a separate P&S camera.
No thanks. I have a flip phone I barely ever use. I have a camera I barely ever use. Once in a blue moon I think 'wouldn't it be nice to have a gps-enabled map right now', but not often enough to be worth the drain on my life that it would be to live inside a smartphone all the time. I know me, and I would be playing games and browsing the internet constantly.
EDIT: how do you run a cycling app without a data plan?