SPOT Connect Satellite Hotspot If you’re consistently travelling off the beaten track – and we don’t just mean up some back road around the Border counties, scary as that might be – this could be just the new year gadget for you. It turns your smartphone into a satellite phone. Sort of. You won’t be able to make calls, but you will be able to send texts, e-mails or alert emergency services from just about anywhere in the world, thanks to Globalstar’s satellite network.
Most importantly of all, you’ll be able to update your social networks. Going off the map is all very well, but imagine being off the social radar too? Now that would be an emergency. And think about how you can really trump someone’s status update with a one-liner from the jungle depths.
The SPOT Connect works by syncing up with your smartphone by Bluetooth and you can then set whatever level of satellite connection you want to maintain, from periodic tracking signals so those at home can follow your route via Google Maps say, to the various SMS and other messaging options. SOS capabilities too, of course.
It’s being launched this month and costs for Europe aren’t finalised, but it will have an initial unit cost and then a yearly service fee.
CostSPOT Connect Satellite Link for Smartphones, unit price about $169.99 (€129), yearly fee $99 (€75), from findmespot.com.
YikeBike Yikes! When you first see the apparently precarious sitting position for this new electric bike, you could be forgiven for using a more colourful expletive. Basically, it looks back to front, inside out and as if someone has left about two-thirds of it on the garage floor. It’s a bike alright, Jim, but not as we know it.
The YikeBike is the result of five years’ RD for a look that is so revolutionary, perhaps only reinventing the wheel itself could be more surprising. They call it a “mini-farthing”, but that’s the only vaguely backward-looking aspect of it. Other than the sitting position, of course, which is on the handlebars, like you’re giving yourself a lift.
This is hi-tech through every strand of its carbon fibre composite body, with built-in LEDs, a lithium phosphate battery that recharges in 40 minutes and a 1kw electric motor that will speed along at up to 23km/h with a 10km range. Oh, and did I mention that it folds up in less than 20 seconds to carry with you? There’s even a strap. It’s what you whip out after your train or bus journey for the final leg to the office.
It’s the smallest, lightest electric folding bike in world. A niche category you rightly say, but will the competition ever be a traffic-stopper like this? Yikes, indeed.
CostYikeBike Foldable Electric Bike, £2,422 (€2,850), from yikebike.com.
Schwalbe Marathon Winter Tyres There’s plenty of loose talk at the moment about getting snow chains or socks for our cars if the winters are going to continue giving us an Arctic lick.
And if you’ve struggled out of a Citywest car parking space, thanks only to the kindness of strangers and the destruction of a yoga mat, we’ll all need to get a grip.
What of cyclists though? Well, they need a set of winter tyres from Schwalbe. They’ve dozens of tiny carbide studs that dig in to give real bite on compacted snow and ice.
These tips are favoured to the sides of the tyres, so that the effect is most pronounced when you’re cornering, ie when you’re most likely to get all Torvill and Dean.
They come in a range of sizes from folding bikes up to 29” tourers. And all sizes have Kevlar belts for puncture protection, a reflective sidewall strip and a dynamo strip.
You’ll find Schwalbe Tyres in plenty of good bike shops here, but none of them seem to stock the winter models. Yet.
CostSchwalbe Marathon Studded Winter Tyres, about £40 (€47), from dotbike.com.