SRAM buys Hammerhead
 

:(

I think it'll probably be a good thing. SRAM is dedicated to cycling, it's not some dot.com tech company taking over. Being a cycling company is good for us. Maybe an influx of cash will help HH in development. They desperately need a better battery that has 16 hrs. or so to put them closer to Garmins 20 hr. life on their 830.

Here's what DCR had to say.

this is gonna have big ramifications for the bike computer industry – both consumers and other competitors. For their competitors, the news will undoubtedly give them heartache, likely more so Wahoo and Stages than Garmin. Inversely, consumers should be celebrating this. Hammerhead’s been doing some incredible stuff over the last year especially, and unquestionably this will help further that goal. There’s only so much you can do with limited resources to compete with the resources of a company like Garmin’s size, and this will certainly help those efforts.

Also says Hammerhead is keeping all of their staff and priorities and working independently. :)

I've been thinking since last fall that a big map on my stem all the time would be nice. I wfh and ride on my lunch break lately because of daylight so it'll be spring before I can really benefit from the maps. I've been doing my homework and the K2 seems like the obvious one to buy. By leaps and bounds for my use case.

But I have Di2. Says they'll continue to support it and I know they know they'll sell more supporting Di2 long term. But how can my first reaction not be :eek: and then :(?

Not supporting Shimano stuff would be seriously stupid.

Having a big map is nice.

I think it’s cool, too, and the potential is awesome, particularly on the integration side of things. The idea of a bike being designed to have all the stuff I want it to have integrated into the bike is very attractive to me, and I can see having a “brain” computer baked-in being a core piece to that. Maybe it’s something like the handlebar and stem becoming more like a dashboard instead of having a little pod tacked on as an afterthought.

Not that I want to see things become proprietary, but I’m open to the idea that the bicycle can be a modern vehicle rather than a primitive, throwback, escape vehicle. I mean, I want bikes that are both of those things.

Right now, though, having to use my phone and a variety of mobile apps to communicate/update/control my bike systems is gettin’ kinda old; I’ve got a Wahoo app for the computer, a different Wahoo app for HR and speed sensors, the SRAM app for the drivetrain, the Favero app for the pedals…

Soon someone will find out that if you ride near a 5G cell tower, your bike will crash.

Saw his write-up on it - I agree with him. I think this is probably a pretty strong move for SRAM and I think it's great for consumers too. They're going to put downward price pressure and increase the demand for features and better displays on Garmin. They're going to make Wahoo really up their game on navigation and display. All good.

I've had Karoo's since they first came out from the Kickstarter campaign and I've been a tester for quite a while. I think it's a great product. It fits my use case perfectly too. What I really like is that I side loaded a weather radar app (it's running on straight up Android). I can connect the K2 to the internet through my phone and so I can get realtime weather radar on my bike computer while I'm riding with my position shown. In the spring when the weather here is unstable, that's pretty handy for riding around rain squalls. You can also put a sim card in it and skip the phone. I've been contemplating that too.

They've done a nice job with it - you can get audio turn by turn directions out of it with a BT speaker or ear bud (which I very much like). Lots of features like that really refine the bike computer experience especially if you're navigating with it. Their Varia implementation is best in class over even Garmin IMO.

J.

What radar app ?. Ive a K2 and been pondering side loading a radar app, would be useful in summer

MyRadar is the app available through the Amazon Android store. It’s also got a layer for wind direction and speed which is pretty handy, intuitive and well integrated with the radar view.

https://myradar.com/

Thank you.