Sunday 27 July 2014

Some thoughts on the 2015 Kona lineup

Obviously, I am basing this off of the information on the Kona website, but with my years of experience with Kona bikes, I am reasonably sure that what I am about to say makes at least some sense.

So here goes!

Prices have all gone up. Boo Hiss. But this is not a big surprise really since there is this thing called inflation and bicycles are not free of that either.

On the mountain bike front, the biggest thing worthy of note is that the 26in wheel seems to have suffered a total death. No more basic bikes with 26in wheels. They have all gone to 27 1/2. This is, I think, a very good thing and increases the value for the money in the basic line up.

Beyond that, I have nothing to say about their mountain bikes since I am not much of a mountain biker any more.

On the road bike front, there are some delicious things happening.

First, my beloved Sutra has been given a bit of an overhaul. First of all, and most significant in my view, the saddle on the bike is now a Brooks B17 saddle. I find this amusing as I did this exact thing to mine. I find it even more amusing that I gave up on the Brooks saddle since I could not get it comfortable no matter what I did. Otherwise, the bicycle is basically the same as last year's model. The front rack is gone though. So is mine...

Second, the endurance line up of bicycles is changed completely. Good. What is there now is more affordable, and better. Scandium frames, better parts, and general all around goodness abound. The top bike is so good and priced so well that I would not consider a new Jake the Snake unless I really needed a cyclocross bike. For how I ride and what I ride on/over, the top bike in this lineup is a better choice.

Third, the top end road race bicycle finally looks to be closer to a top end road race bicycle than was previously offered. The components are better, as is the frame. What took Kona so long?

Fourth, the Minute is back. I thought that ditching that bike was a dumb move. Good to see it back. It is back on my must get list. Mid sized cargo bikes make a lot of sense. The Ute is no more though.

Fifth, the Dew line-up has been revamped. Not sure if this is a good thing, but the basic bikes are still what they were and that is a good thing.

Sixth, the classic road bike line-up has a new king, the Kapu. It is a well specced classic steel framed bicycle.

And Seventh, the free range line-up has been puffed up with some new variations on the Rove including a less expensive aluminum one, and one which looks like a Dew on steroids.

Overall, the line-up looks good. We shall see what they look like when they arrive in the shop.


Monday 21 July 2014

Sony Xperia Z2

Move over Apple, there is a new boss in town...

Basically, the story goes like this.

My wonderful wife bought me a wonderful MacBook Pro Retina (snort, I hate marketing hype *roll eyes*) which I have come to truly like. It is a great laptop for photos, text, and all that I would use a laptop for. And yes, the monitor is delicious even if Apple sounds moronic for calling it a "retina" monitor.

Yay me. I got very lucky. Very lucky indeed.

So, figuring that I have been kicked over the fence into Apple land, I decided to explore getting an iPhone. I had been very happily using a BlackBerry Z10, but found that the camera was, to be as gentle as possible, lacking. To be accurate, it sucked horribly. It was and is crap when compared to other smartphones in its class. Also, I have started using Strava, and there is no real app for that with BlackBerry.

The iPhone would solve that for me, and play nicely with my computer.

So I thought, why not?

Well, turns out (obviously I don't know much about iPhones, as this next paragraph will demonstrate) to get any kind of decent memory in an iPhone, you need to pay some serious iMoney. Lots of it. I was willing to do that, sort of, to get the phone, until I noticed that the battery life is not that great if you pound on the gps a lot, which I would be doing since I plan on using Strava a lot. A friend reported that his iPhone 5 would tank after about four or five hours of Strava use, and many of my rides go much longer than that. So a battery case was being looked at as an additional cost. To save money, I was debating an Mophie case with some cheaper storage in it. I could spend less on the case to bump up the battery life and memory than I would spend on more iMemory and a simpler battery case.

But then...

Reviews on the case were not so hot, I did not want the huge bulk, and it seemed like a kluge to have to stick extra memory and battery into a case when if the phone was set up right in the first place (hint, better battery and a micro-sd slot) none of it would be needed.

But then some more...

So I did some digging into other phones (which ran Android) and noticed the Sony. It has killer battery life (I have yet to drop below 50% in a day of heavy use) and a micro-sd slot. It is freaking huge, which is a pain, and is all glass, which I don't like much, but it has several things going for it which made that stuff stuff I was willing to live with.

It is waterproof.

In the real world, we use our phones. In the real world, it rains. There is NO EXCUSE for ANY phone to be made in this day and age which is not waterproof. It is a total no-brainer.

Win for Sony, the only company which sells a phone through Bell Mobility which gets this basic fact.

Any why does this matter to me? I ride my bike in the real world and get rained on. ZipLock bags are so last week...

Remember cameras? Remember how the iPhone would solve the camera issue?

Remember who makes the Xperia?

Sony.

The makers of the some of the best if not THE best consumer grade camera sensors on the planet. Their sensors are good. Very Very good.

Wait. This is a Sony phone. That means a Sony camera.

This must be a good thing.

It is.









Works for me.

Tuesday 8 July 2014

why nothing but nothing will replace a summer sky

I think I will let the pictures do the talking tonight. Here is a sampling of tonight's light show.

Do please enjoy.