After losing weight over the spring of 2017 and resurrecting my dormant active lifestyle, my love of bicycling also rejuvenated itself. But really, how much could use of a simple machine like a bicycle have changed in just a decade or so? For those in the sport for more than a decade, you’ll see the humor in that question. I still

have a 1987 Panasonic DX3000 that I proudly run up and down the Santa Ana River Trail in SoCal… so going from that to a carbon-framed, modern shifting, compact gear set bike is quite the revolution. What else has attacked the senses of this old man re-entering the sport? Why data acquisition of course. Enter the Karoo Hammerhead.

I saw the ad online, taken in by the professional introduction video and promise of a modern interface – I was interested. Add in the fact that I am an early adopter of most platforms, even if I don’t stick with them, the promise of beta testing pricing set the hook. For just $299.00 I would receive a bike computer running on Android. It would have a color touch screen, hardy body for my mountain biking, connectivity to Bluetooth and ANT devices and seamless interaction with Strava — which has become one of my best new friends.

When I first got back into biking, I fell into the idea of taking music, mapping my rides and tracking my progress. The smartphone is a master at this type of tasking. I quickly bought a handlebar mounted phone mount and ran the smartphone like a dashboard on the bicycle.  In theory, this is a masterful solution. In practice, not so much. I found the mount to need constant fiddling as the jolts would move the mount or phone around. I hear your mind already… “Why not just tighten the mount?”. Well the first time I did that, it snapped… hello second phone mount. I liked the data but hated the idea of constant

fidgeting and concern about the phone getting damaged in a crash, let alone jostling out of the mount. As I graduated to the Cyclocross and Gravel riding, I was shocked at how violent the location was to the overpriced electronics I had mounted with the expectation of reliability. I had to step it up.

I had decided to toss the mobile phone mounts and fly blind with the phone in my back jersey pocket. I still recorded data on the phone but didn’t shake the living snot out of it. The only obstacle here is the treasured group ride when you take lead. Usually, on my group rides, we’ll pick a speed ceiling to not exceed. The thinking is “Hey, we are going to ride 65 miles, let’s keep the pace under 20MPH to make sure we don’t overdo it.” Well, when I am in the lead, the guy sucking up my draft in position 2 has the responsibility of telling me to slow down. No more!!

I ordered the hammerhead. It was September 15, 2017. I was excited. I scoured over every blog post they produced and read comments from others that were annoyed at having to wait for the units to go into production. By the end of December, I had all but forgotten about the $299.00 I had spent. I had grown numb of waiting for the unit. One announcement after another of postponed production, vendor parts supply, government interference and finally shipping information hit my inbox until Friday, April 13, 2018.  About a month earlier I had even sent a response to one of the delay emails asking them to stop apologizing. I knew what I signed up for when I bought the thing. They were taking a new product to market and the pre-sales made them liquid to pull it off… but they still had to do the work to get it there.

One blessing I received for my patience was the idea that the very first units had bugs. People jumped online and complained about auto-pausing not pausing, or restarting. They mentioned poor reporting of speed or distance. The company was rolling out updates to address the bugs and I was home waiting to try mine. Finally – last Saturday – April 14 – I hit the trail at Chino Hills State Park, Hammerhead installed and logging data.

Let’s cover it from the beginning. I got the box – yeah! As I unpacked the box, I was super pleased with the premium presentation of the product. The Hammerhead retail packaging is top notch. I removed the clear bag, separated the box and there it was. The Hammerhead. It was clean with no fingerprints. It spent over a week on the road but had 69% charge on the battery when I powered it up. I disassembled the rest of the packaging to discover the mount, the charge cable, owner’s guide and tools to install the unit on the bike.

I hit the workstation in the garage to install the bracket (I apologize for the poor lighting – I had no patience). While this was going on, the unit was plugged in bringing up the charge to full. Powered on, the unit indicated it was ready for an update. Boom! Nearly 700MB later, it was ready to play. It asks you to sign into Hammerhead, connect your Strava Account (if wanted) and seems truly intuitive as you see screens leading to tutorial videos. Within less than 20 minutes, I had downloaded previous routes off my Strava and Ride with GPS accounts for offline use. I had custom-named my pages for “Grindin” and was ready to record a ride.

I chose Chino Hills State Park riding up Telegraph Trail to Four Corners and back as it is a very familiar path to me, and gives me a benchmark to compare the data. I was so impressed with the first ride. Backing up the data on my phone for the ride to compare as well, I hit the trail in the heat of the day. It was a warm day… 86 degrees and dry. I sampled a few of the items that I had seen called out in previous posts online. I stopped, the Hammerhead paused. I restarted and the Hammerhead seemed to wait a few seconds, then just as I was going to manually restart it – it came back to life counting the time. The screen was readable no matter the angle or the fact that I had polarized eye-protection on. This is so much better than trying to stare at my HTC at speed! The ease of mounting, using, reading is awesome. Many of my friends have competitors products. They love theirs too – for the most part, but the screen is so much more vibrant and bigger.

The kicker — what about the precious data? Well first, let’s set the bar appropriately. Let’s remember that Fitbit just went through Hades online for publishing that their product is for entertainment only and not to really aggregate data. All these “Housewives of Hometown USA” are ready to brawl over lost Fitbit challenges? When my circle compares the data via Garmin, iPhone, HTC, Samsung, etc… there is always a small fluctuation in the performance indicated. One of my friends has one though that greatly under-records performance compared to the rest of us. I was thrilled to see the Hammerhead report within .2 miles on a 16 plus mile ride. In terms of elevation, it was about 100 feet off the HTC phone with over 1,100 foot of climb.  Not knowing the true margin of error to the truth for either tool, I am more than happy with these results.

 

 

 

 

One annoyance that I am sure I can address is the rattling. The Hammerhead is rattling and shaking in the mount – driving me nuts. I will attempt to shield it with some type of adhesive backed felt or something to reduce the noise. There was a wrist strap and felt in the packaging, so I will see if that is the purpose.

 

 

Riding with the new Hammerhead from Karoo has given me a whole new riding perspective.

Manana No Mas! Product Review

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