The new Oura Ring 5 is a genuinely and significantly smaller ring than the previous Oura Ring 4 that was on my finger. That part isn’t really debatable. And the real-world battery life seems to be a *slight* improvement over the past, though most of the time Oura rings seem to slowly lose their battery life, so this could just be a case of new unit vs well-worn unit. And finally, indeed, there are some new features – but those too are available to all recent Oura ring owners, and aren’t specific to the Oura Ring 5.

Nonetheless, I’ve been putting it through its paces over the last near-month across everything from swimming to cycling to running to strength workouts, and of course, simply sleeping and daily life. After all, that’s frankly what the Oura Ring is best at: Things other than sports. In fact, to be really clear upfront, I’d argue that even with some minor new features in the sports realm, the Oura Ring 5 is now woefully behind even the most basic wearables when it comes to sports tracking. So much so that as I tried to do accuracy comparisons, I’d forgotten just how far behind they are in this realm (and that’s aside from the accuracy itself).

Still, there are reasons you want a ring (from any company), which is most simply summed up: You don’t want to wear a watch/smart band. If you already have one of those watch/band devices, there’s literally no reason to get an Oura Ring in 2026, everyone else is too good – even the budget ones.

With that, let’s dive into the details. Note that I purchased this unit myself, along with the previous few versions, and I pay for my own subscription to the Oura Ring service.

Oura Ring 5 vs Ring 4:

So, what’s different? Size: this is almost entirely about size – and size-related things (though surprisingly, not reduced battery life). Here are the core differences:

– Reduced width: From 7.9mm down to 6.1mm
– Reduced thickness: From 2.8mm down to 2.28mm
– Reduced weight: From 3.3-5.2g down to 2g
– Reduced size options: From size 4-15 to size 6-13
– Increased battery life claim: From 5-8 days to 6-9 days
– The Sensors: They’ve decreased from 18 to 12 light paths, but 4x’d the strength of the lights, otherwise
– Pricing: Increased by $50 from $349 to $399 (base price, other options)
– Subscription: Still remains the same at $5.99/month

With the sensor changes, the company says that despite reducing the number of light pathways from 18 to 12, it’s increased the light brightness by 4x, which in turn has resulted in a 12% increase in nighttime HRV accuracy, and up to a 19% increase in workout accuracy.

As for the size, the company claims it’s up to 40% smaller than the previous edition, and likely that depends on precisely which model they’re talking about. Here’s my Oura 3 vs 4 vs 5 (all size 10):

For the model types, here’s the full range of colors:

And the pricing is:

Base models – $399/429EUR: Silver, and Black (mine is the base silver one)
Premium models – $499/529EUR: Gold, Stealth, Brushed Silver, and Deep Rose

Ok, got all that? Let’s dive into the box.

In the Box(es):

One thing to remember is that before you get ‘The Box’, you get ‘Another Box’. Specifically, when you order an Oura ring, you first get a sizing kit box. That box is a package of fake Oura rings, simply sizing rings for each size. They recommend you wear the ring for 24 hours prior to ordering your actual ring. They also note that their ring sizes might not match other ring sizes, hence the sizing kit.

In my case, I’ve consistently worn a Size 10 Oura ring since many versions ago. Also, in my case, I wear it on my ring finger. Oura has noted over the years that you can technically wear it on any finger you want, as long as it doesn’t rotate/move around by itself (mine doesn’t). Their general suggestion is the index finger; however, I personally don’t like the look of the ring on that finger for myself. To each their own.

In any case, once you validate the size you want, you go onto their site and simply choose the ring size, and it’ll ship out the actual ring to you in the final ring box. Below are the bits inside:

In short, you’ve got:

1) The Oura 5 ring itself
2) The Oura 5 charging dock with USB-C port (note: this dock is different than the Oura 4 charging dock)
3) USB-C to USB-C cable
4) Some paper stuff you probably won’t read

It’s all pretty straightforward.

Daily Life Tracking:

The thing Oura does best is quietly and discreetly tracking your daily activity, without having to wear a connected watch or band on your wrist. And given the even smaller size of the Oura Ring 5, it arguably does this better than ever. Of course, since there’s no external lights, vibration motor, or other display on the ring, everything it collects ends up in the Oura app.

The Oura app has been redesigned over the past year, and for the most part you’re either gonna love it or hate it. The app design essentially splits your information into two pieces: A row of scores along the top (readiness, sleep, activity, etc…), and then a never-ending scroll of larger display information down below it. Personally, I find it dilutes the information too much, and doesn’t really make your actual data very clear, but hey, that’s where we are today.

Starting with the top row, you’ve got a lightly customizable row of scores including: Readiness Score, Sleep Score, Activity Score, Heart Rate (Current), Stress (minutes), and then the ability to add Resilience (or, to remove the others):

Tapping on any of those individual scores brings you to more details about that particular metric/score. For example, if we tap on the ‘Readiness’ Score, it’ll bring us to a timeline showing readiness over the past week, plus the contributors to today’s score:

Generally speaking for wearables, including Oura, the Readiness Score attempts to bring in all the factors that define how ready you are for the day (including workouts or other demanding tasks). This includes looking at trends like resting heart rate, HRV (heart rate variability), Sleep, and Activity. These trends are specific to you and your historical data, not the overall population (especially for things like HRV). For example, in the case of HRV within Oura, it’s trending that over a 3-month period, and comparing the last two weeks to that value. That’s a bit high compared to most wearables that trend the last 7 days versus the 3-month (90-day) period, but I don’t have any real issues there (you can debate both sides of that coin).

However, this is why most wearables, again including Oura, really require at a minimum 2-3 weeks of data to be useful for these types of scores, and realistically require 2-3 months to have a solid baseline to work from. After which, each of the 9 different metrics that make up the Readiness score will have differing trending lengths.

In any case, heading onwards there’s sleep tracking. You can simply tap the ‘Sleep’ score at the top of the main dashboard to access it. This is an area that Oura really developed its name on, back at its beginnings in the 2015-2018 era. It did a lot of work to be a leader in sleep data during that time, especially as other early sleep tracking wearables struggled to get accurate data. However, fast-forwarding a decade, and frankly, there’s no meaningful difference between Oura and other wearables for core sleep stats. It’s an advantage that has largely faded away, as others have gotten really good as well.

As an example, here’s how a few day time-slices of tracking compared:

The gist of things? Scores roughly trend, but how each one decides awake/sleep time (especially during the middle of the night) is kinda all over the place.

Of course, more challenging is the exact times I woke up each day. Let’s look at this morning (Friday the 3rd):

Reality/Actual Went to sleep at ~1:45AM, woke up at 7:50AM, and snoozed twice till ~8:09AM
Oura Ring 5: Asleep at 1:48AM, woke up at 8:12AM
Whoop 5.0/MG: Asleep at 1:48AM, woke up at 7:59AM
Amazfit Helio: Asleep at 2:11AM, woke up at 8:10AM
Polar Loop: Asleep at 1:54AM, woke up at 8:12AM
Fitbit Air: Asleep at 1:48AM, woke up at 8:07AM
Garmin Fenix 8 Pro: Asleep at 1:37AM, woke up at 8:08AM

In any case, here’s what you’ll see on Oura’s page. Below you can see my sleep score, as well as its attempts to quantify sleep stages. Keeping in mind that most so-called gold-standard medical-grade sleep-scoring devices only hit about 80% accuracy rates, and this is at best below that. So I wouldn’t overthink sleep stage/phase components/accuracy.

Instead, focus on total sleep, sleep debt, and the sleep consistency metrics (roughly what they refer to as ‘Body Clock’). These are ultimately what will matter. Simply put: If you’re only getting 5 hours of sleep per night, no amount of supposed deep sleep phase/stage data is going to be getting you out of that hole. You can see these key metrics down below:

I actually really like Oura’s Sleep Debt feature (even if I’m probably constantly in debt), I think it’s honestly a better way of showing sleep needs than what most of their competitors show. Whoop also has sleep debt, but most other wearables don’t.

Anyways, below that you’ll find nighttime breathing, lowest heart rate values, and HRV trends. Generally speaking, I find HRV trending to be one of the best ways to predict upcoming sickness, especially 1-2 days out. My HRV values will drop considerably, just a night or two prior to visible symptoms of a cold. Keeping in mind, however, that significant evening drinking (or a massive workout/race) can also drive the same result, thus, it’s somewhat important to know if those other factors occurred.

In fact, you can even tag activities here, so you can see how they impact HRV. For example, I talked about alcohol and workouts, but even other factors like certain drugs (good or bad), can impact it. The same obviously goes for a red-eye flight, and many more factors. This helps you figure out those factors long term. The Sleep Health text you see above simply trends your sleep scores over time, which I’ll cover in the next section around ‘Vitals’.

Now, if we just glance at the lower bar, you’ll see it’s broken out from the original home dashboard bar with three buttons (Today/Vitals/My Health), to four buttons (Readiness/Sleep/Activity/Heart Rate + Stress). So, we’ll go with activity next. Here, it shows us total ‘activity’, where activity is defined as basically movement, including steps, workouts (confusingly also called ‘Activity’), and movement. You’ll also see training volume/frequency/recovery time, but as I’ll cover in the next section…umm…just ignore those.

As we scroll down, we can see activities pulled in from Strava. You can enable Strava sync (which is bidirectional, whether you like it or not), which in theory helps Oura classify activities (or, understand workouts you didn’t do with the Oura ring).

Now, that’s the end of the activity overview section there, but I’ll cover workouts in the next major section. For now, let’s wrap up with the ‘Heart Rate & Stress’ section:

This doesn’t really show a lot of new information, but rather, just summarizes existing information we’ve already seen at this point, and shows your heart rate values over the course of the day.

Meanwhile, looking at stress, it’ll plot that over the course of the day. You’ll notice how just after 18:00, it doesn’t have any white dots; that’s because during that timeframe I was doing a trail run. Oura puts these as high-stress events, rather than nullifying them like Garmin does. Yet concurrently, Oura doesn’t include this time in the ‘Stressed’ category. It’s kind of a weird halfsies decision. While from a medical standpoint, workouts are a ‘stressor’, they aren’t typically what most people would align to being ‘Stressed’. Especially since most people will do a workout to reduce stress (and most medical folks would recommend the same). Ideally, they’d just zero out that section of the chart, but I appreciate at least not plotting those points in the totals seen at the bottom.

Oh, and in terms of battery life, as a data point, on June 9th at 6PM, I was at 100% battery, and then by June 16th at 9PM, I was down to 7% and needing to recharge. So basically, 7 days of battery life for the size 10 unit, with roughly 1-2 hours of workout time per day (on average). On a second battery charge, it started that June 16th at 11PM on a full charge, but by the morning of June 22nd, it was down to 8% again and needed to be charged, putting it at 6 days this time. Then further again, the next charge after that also lasted 6 days before it was down to 10% and needed a charge before bed.

My Real World Battery Testing:
Week 1: 7 Days
Week 2: 6 Days
Week 3: 6 Days
Week 4: On track for 6 days again

That’s technically within the 6-9 day spec, but definitely not 9 days.

Vitals & My Health Sections:

Next, we’ve got two sections that essentially summarize all the other sections, and trend them a bit. Having a ‘Vitals’ section is the trendy thing to do the last few years, which basically looks at your stats in the other section and gives you a trend line. Here you can see this occurring for readiness, sleep, and others:

And yet more tiles:

Each of those tiles simply links back to one of the other previously discussed data points in the section prior. That said, I do need to draw your attention to that VO2Max score of 38, which is hilariously wrong/low. Most devices have my VO2Max in the 56-58ish realm these days. I was tested last year around 58 again, where I tend to float. The kicker here being I was even taking the time/effort to ensure all my multi-hour daily workouts were properly logged with Oura, and atop that, it has *YEARS* of my data to go on. Whatever they are doing here is just hard wrong.

Meanwhile, ‘My Health ’ is again more of the same, but now with color-coded trending for each section:

There is however, a Sleep Chronotype at the bottom, though that was already displayed in the Sleep section:

Now, the challenge with Oura’s sleep chronotype classification is that it’s not actually detecting my chronotype, but rather, forcing it. In my case, it shows my ‘Awake’ time each day at 8:03AM, and then simply adding 8 hours earlier to make it midnight. But in my case, I’m virtually never in bed by midnight (more like 1-2AM), and the 8:03AM? That’s simply me setting an alarm each day for the 7:50AM kids morning school rush, snoozing it once before finally getting up. On the weekend, it’s much later, and if there’s no school rush, it’s definitely not 8:03AM.

The point is, this is at best a useless categorization of your daily trends, but is definitely not your actual chronotype. Never mind the fact that since when did going to bed at 12AM classify as an “early evening type”? I mean, jokingly I’ll say midnight is ‘early evening’, but most rational people would classify an “early evening” bedtime as probably 9-10PM.

Sports Tracking:

Let’s be upfront about this: The Oura ring is not at all great for sports tracking. While the company did add some new features around activity tracking at the same time they announced the Oura Ring 5, they are pretty minimal in the grand scheme of things.

Specifically, new app updates now allow you to see *slightly* more data than in the past when you start a manual workout. However, that does not actually include the ability to see the ring’s heart rate data during the workout itself, only afterward in a highly smoothed manner. Further, they don’t push that data to 3rd party platforms such as Strava.

In any case, when it comes to sports tracking, you’ve actually got three main options:

1) Let the unit automatically detect the exercise, and you manually tweak the classification (sport type) if need be
2) Manually start a workout on the run to get that counted as a workout
3) Sync in the data from some other wearable/device, to get it counted as a workout

There’s some solid irony in the fact that the best way to work out with an Oura ring…is to wear another company’s device. Technically speaking, there’s also a third option:

For the automatic exercise bits, it virtually never gets those right for me (except sometimes cycling), and that’s with years of Oura ring experience. So instead, I’d rely on the manual activity creation.

To begin, you’ll tap in the lower-right to start a Live Activity, which opens up the menu to select the sport type as well as heart rate source.

We’ll get to the sport type in a second. But as you can see above, there are two options for the heart rate. The first is ‘Live Heart Rate Source’, where you choose another brand/unit to act as your heart rate sensors. In this scenario, you can pair to not just any Bluetooth HR sensor, but also anything through Apple Health (such as AirPod Pro 3 or PowerBeats Pro 2). It’s important to note that if you don’t have such a device, you can’t see your heart rate data during the workout live.

I can see how Oura likely convinced themselves that by allowing pairing to a heart rate strap, it ‘solved’ their sports-tracking problem. I can totally imagine how that conference room conversation went, but in reality, it just exposes the gap to other wearables even more. After all, Oura is basically saying you need another $60-$100 heart rate strap (plus your $400 ring) to do what the $99 Fitbit Air can do. And that still doesn’t solve for the basics of not including heart rate data in the activity file to platforms like Strava and others, which is simply baffling (more on that in a second).

In any case, we’ll choose the ring itself for now, since this is a review of a ring, not devices you should buy instead of the ring. Likewise, we’ll choose our sport. To Oura’s credit, there are a gazillion sport profiles to choose. I never knew Finnish baseball was a thing, but…umm…here we are (Oura is a Finnish company).

With all that settled, we’ll start our run. At this point, this is the only data screen you’ll see:

It shows your pace (or speed, if cycling), as well as your distance and time. That’s it. No map pages, no heart rate data, no heart rate zone pages, no training load, or anything else that virtually all of its competitors show. It’s really, really, really basic.

If you were to pair a heart rate strap with it, then you’d see one additional data metric, your heart rate:

But there are so many inconsistencies here. If you do an indoor workout (with an external HR sensor), you’ll see a nifty HR zone gauge with full page zone coloring behind it. But, if you do an outdoor workout, you don’t get that gauge, you just get a value, and small text for the zone. Also, sometimes it’ll just randomly lose GPS too (as seen above briefly). Oura, you have all the space in the world on that page, there’s no need to skip the zone indicator/gauge when outdoors.

No matter with or without an HR sensor, once your workout is complete, you can see a summary of the workout, including the map page if you did track an outdoor GPS activity, such as my run.

But here’s where things get baffling: Despite Oura’s long-standing integration with Strava, they don’t send any heart rate data to Strava in the file. Mind you, apps that leverage the Oura API can access it, so this is just Oura being super-lazy with not putting that data in the completed workout file they send to Strava.

Here, we can see this same run over on Strava, missing all heart rate data (the first screenshot shows from Oura, the second shows Oura as the device type, and the third shows missing HR data):

How the heck is this even remotely possible in 2026? C’mon Oura, wake up. You added this nifty feature, yet didn’t add the one point of data that you actually collect from the ring: Heart rate.

But wait – it gets worse! If you took the step of connecting a HR sensor to the Oura app to record your heart rate data live, then Oura won’t even send the workout file to 3rd party apps (Strava or otherwise). Yes, you read that right: not only do you not get the HR data, but it won’t send *anything* (the whole workout is missing) to 3rd party apps. It’s baffling. I’ve tried both indoor and outdoor workouts, the latest app update, multiple 3rd party apps, etc… How Oura, how?!?

Sigh.

All of which simply solidifies my earlier statement: If you want something to track your workouts, the Oura Ring definitely isn’t it.

Heart Rate Accuracy:

Now, setting aside my lack of recommendation for using the Oura Ring 5 for workouts, I will go ahead and at least briefly look at accuracy during said workouts. In this case, I pulled the heart rate data using a 3rd party app (Athalyze), which receives the data from Oura’s API. From there, I can compare it to other heart rate sensors that I wore during those workouts.

Note that Oura doesn’t offer any meaningful workout export feature otherwise. You can request to export your overall Oura data here, but that doesn’t include the underlying heart rate data; rather, it’s just a simple one-line-item summary of each workout in a CSV file. Again, I don’t really understand how a company full of really smart data scientists has fallen so far behind in data basics here. Also, somehow this takes up to 10 business days for that export to be completed.

In any case, let’s look at a few workouts…

First up, an indoor trainer workout (cycling). This had basically five intervals in it, but wasn’t super high-intensity. Here, you can see the Oura ring listed in hot NEON GREEN, and for the most part it was basically close enough to the chest strap and other sensors. But the second interval it did get lost for a bit, upwards of 24bpm offset (which is quite a bit):

If we look at another indoor trainer workout, you can see it’s basically spot-on. Note here it’s in ORANGE, though that doesn’t matter much as it’s nearly identical. There are only a few minor variations for a few seconds that are just a couple bpm away. Good stuff.

Next, let’s look at some runs. The first one is a road run, and the Oura is in BLUE. In this case, there’s one brief moment it drops out, but otherwise it’s very similar to the chest strap and other sensors, with only minor deviations. Good stuff again.

Next, I head out for a trail run. This is where you start to see a few more variations as I descend. In this case, we’re still in BLUE for the Oura ring, but you can see it struggles a bit as I descend down one section. And then likewise, it skips a hard effort back up a hill around the 30-minute marker, just totally missing it. But the rest of the run, it’s pretty good.

Next, another trail run, this one quite a bit more challenging in terrain. It’s basically 40 minutes of climbing at 10-20% gradient, and then a steep descent back down from there. The terrain is sometimes smooth, and sometimes super rocky requiring jumps/leaps. The point being you can see that on that descent, the HR accuracy basically falls apart for the entire rest of the run:

For fun, here’s that elevation graph, matched to the HR graph. Somewhat notable that the HR lock was ‘good’ again around the 1hr12m marker, when I had a slight ascent again, and then lost the plot promptly after that.

I had also done some strength workouts, though with automatic exercise recognition, it won’t send those off to 3rd-party apps. And then equally, the one time I did a manual strength workout, it failed to save anything (appeared the app crashed). Sigh.

Still, setting that aside, what’s notable here is that the heart rate accuracy for workouts for me is largely pretty good actually. Really good in some cases. There are places where it struggles, such as descents while running (due to cadence lock likely, a common issue in watch optical HR sensors on the wrist). It’s really too bad that despite reasonably good heart rate accuracy for workouts, Oura doesn’t send this data to Strava, and then even worse being when you pair a HR sensor to it (to address these shortcomings), it doesn’t send that workout data anywhere at all.

Wrap-Up:

In a quirky way, I wonder if the Oura Ring 5 is ‘peak Oura’? Which is to say that it’s clearly the best Oura to date (in terms of size, and also some small accuracy gains according to Oura). But equally, if you’ve already got an existing Oura ring, the only tangible gain you’re likely to notice is the size. It’s very difficult to notice a 12% increase in HRV accuracy, and the claimed 19% increase in workout HR accuracy isn’t super functional given how limited the sports/workout features are (not even passable for 2008 phone workout apps).

In fact, I’d argue that Oura’s failure to figure out how to move the product forward from a workout standpoint actually helps to solidify its core reason for existing in life: General life/sleep tracking in a super-discreet form factor. Meaning, Oura really got its start with sleep tracking, in an era when other wearables struggled. But fast-forward a decade, and as I showed above, and have shown repeatedly over the last few years, the major brands are all mostly a wash for sleep tracking. They’re all getting the sleep times and HRV scores correct, and with roughly consistent sleep scores. But again, Oura does this in a tiny ring, with no other watch or band required. If you don’t want to wear a watch or band, this becomes a solved problem for you. And being smaller is certainly nice – I’ve got no complaints there.

That said, I feel like 80% of the app is basically just recycled trending charts of other parts of the app. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times they re-display readiness, sleep score, or activity score trend lines on different sections of the app. It all begins to feel rather circular. Certainly, other companies re-display attributes in other areas (including Garmin & Whoop), but those companies have vastly more unique metrics than they do duplicated metrics. It feels like they’ve kinda given up on innovating with actual new features, and just instead keep creating new charts of the same data they’ve had for nearly a decade. Yes, they’ve added new integrations to a variety of 3rd party platforms (with more planned), but the things within their own house haven’t really changed (if you don’t believe me, go back and look at my Oura Ring 3 review from 5 years ago).

To wrap up, I think the Oura Ring 5 has value for folks that want some of the core sleep/activity metrics in a simplified way, but don’t want to wear a watch/band. It’s quite good at doing that – really good. However, if you’re already wearing a watch/band (or care about fitness/sports tracking), the Oura Ring probably isn’t what you’re after.

With that, thanks for reading!

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Back a few months ago, I drove one hour from my home to the Zwift Community Live 2026 event, where I rode around on a slate of stunning Mallorca roads. During that time, I took approximately 2,186 photos that I have basically no use for. 41 of which were of a Zwift-branded watch sitting at the front of a converted foyer-ish conference room at the event. Oddly, virtually nobody else seemed to post photos of it.

I had intended to do so, but then I left the next morning for a few weeks of vacation across the pond with family, and it fell deep into the ‘never seen again’ dumpster that is my iPhone’s photo gallery. Alongside 240,086 other photos (for real, that’s how many photos are in my phone). Until last week or so, when Zwift and Bravur, apparently, announced said new watch. Thus, in an effort to salvage the 8 minutes of time I spent actually taking these photos, I present them to you.

Of course, I have zero plans to review this watch. There’s no point; it has no tech in it whatsoever. I’m not a classical timepiece guy; I’m a ‘What features does it have?’ guy. Maybe some day I’ll retire from this and go cold turkey, reverting back to tick-tock-clock, but for now, that’s not the case.

The Tech Specs:

Here are the main specs of this watch, as written by a company that knows these sorts of things. All I see are ‘blah…blah…blah…no Bluetooth…blah…blah…blah”. I added a line or two at the end.

Case: 37 mm diameter, 44,6 mm lug to lug, stainless steel 316L, 18 mm lug width. Screw down crown.

Crystal: Domed sapphire, inside anti-reflective coating.

Case back: Stainless steel

Movement: Swiss Made Sellita SW200-2 Power+, 26 jewels, self winding, no date

Power reserve: Up to 62 hours

Frequency: 28 800 A/h (4 Hz)/8 beats per second

Dial: Black with lava texture at the centre, luminous “Tron” ring, applied indices infilled with Super-LumiNova with Zwift symbols at 3, 6, 9 and 12H. Racing-inspired minute track.

Hands: Rhodium plated hour and minute hands infilled with Super-LumiNova, orange lightning shaped second hand

Strap: Integrated black FKM rubber strap and orange FKM rubber strap included

Water resistance: 10 ATM

Limited Edition: 100 pcs, individually numbered

Manufacturing: HAND BUILT IN BÅSTAD, SWEDEN (this was ALL CAPS in their specs, so I LEFT IT)

Price: $1,195USD+import fees/taxes, 1,395EUR VAT included

Random other things: Includes a leather cycling bag, also doesn’t have Bluetooth

When it comes to Zwift-specific elements, you’ve got the Zwift power-ups at 3/6/9/12hr markers, as well as Ride On and Zwift logos on the back. Supposedly the luminous ring around the outside is designed to mirror that of the Tron bike. The second-hand has a lightning shape to it, and the seconds themselves are “racing-inspired”. Also, Zwift orange. All the orange.

The Gallery:

Here ya go, I slimmed down those 40 shots into the handful that weren’t duplicates or otherwise dorked up. Above, you can see the back of it, with the Zwift logos, as well as Ride On (and Ride On thumbs-up). The unit they had floating around had the orange band, but it also comes with a black band. You can see the front of it on the green watch holder (as opposed to my wrist) in the next section.

Meanwhile, here it is on my wrist. As you’ll see in a second, it felt quite a bit smaller than the watches I’m used to wearing, but nothing wrong with that.

My wrist size is 17cm (or about 6.5 inches). Here it is on an angle:

And tilted some more. I’m not sure if you were expecting fancier captions than this, but how else do I say “I turned my wrist so you can see the coveted underside of the band.”?

Now, for context, this watch is 38mm. That’s pretty small by smartwatch standards. Most smaller watches from Apple/Garmin/etc start around 40-42mm these days. That said, I was wearing an Apple Watch Ultra 3 and a Garmin Fenix 8 Pro MicroLED (51mm) on my wrists that day, so here’s how that compares for funsies.

And finally, in an effort not to waste this photo either, I give you more angular action:

Regrettably, as a smartwatch photographer, I failed to notice in the above image that the Apple Watch screen had gone to sleep. Thankfully, this isn’t a smartwatch post, so…shrug. Also, in the above photo you can basically see that the Garmin MicroLED beefcake variant can reasonably eat 2-3 Zwift watches for breakfast.

Wrap-Up:

Look, I think it’s a pretty watch. Legit, I do; it looks really nice in person. It’s just not my jam in any way/shape/form. The Bravur folks kindly asked if I’d like to review it. But I’d have literally nothing more to add beyond what I showed above. Sure, I could take prettier pictures – maybe find a yacht buddy somewhere on this island (realistically, it’d probably just end up in my inflatable two-person kayak I bought). But I wouldn’t add anything extra to this conversation.

As always with fancy fashion things, they rarely make sense to 95% of the population (including me). Just like $10,000 bikes don’t make sense to 95% of the population, and $500/person Michelin-starred dinners don’t make sense to 95% of the population. But I’ve also long-ago learned that for every silly-expensive hobby, there’s a market, even if I’m not that market. To each their own.

With that – thanks for reading!

As I walked towards the main entrance to Eurobike, it was desolate. The slate of temporary bike parking spots that in previous years would have been overflowing with hundreds upon hundreds of bikes was empty. After passing through the doors, I walked nearly a  kilometer through virtually empty connecting hallways to get to the show areas. Again, in previous years, these too would be slammed wall-to-wall with people trying to get to the main floor on show open.

But ultimately, the most ironic part of this opening day sequence was the very first thing I saw as I walked into the main hall. It was not a bike, but rather, a small 2-person Fiat electric car. Next to it, the above quad. Many have said it was this very thing that ultimately killed Eurobike – the show owners’ attempt to turn it into a combined micro-mobility show, rather than a bike show.

Eurobike’s claimed the number of exhibitors in the 2026 edition at 800, a fall from 1,500 exhibitors the year prior (2025), and 1,800 in 2024. I’d also take a wager that the number of exhibitors that actually showed up in 2026 is notably less than that 800 figure. There were a lot of random empty booth spots floating around.

I figured I’d take a moment to preemptively write an obituary of sorts to a show that I’ve attended 14 years’ worth of editions, across both Friedrichshafen and Frankfurt. And later on, I’ll explain why it’s dead, despite their half-hearted claims that it’s not.

Why It’s Fallen Apart:

In reality, it was a confluence of things (that included) that have killed Eurobike. Many big industry trade shows were on the decline even before Eurobike added cars, but their inclusion came along with the rest of the avalanche of things that killed the show. I won’t make this a super long post, but I do want to highlight the main areas:

A) The shift from Friedrichshafen to Frankfurt: Look, too many people have rose-tinted glasses about Friedrichshafen. It was a nightmare for everyone involved. Seriously, it really did suck logistically. Hotels booked a year in advance, and even then, you often had to commute 60-90 minutes each way each day to get to the show from said far-flung hotels (even across the lake on a ferry). The buses from the train station to the show were bafflingly bad at doing the one task they had to do: Transport you 2km. You could almost always walk faster, due to horrible traffic (but you’d be drenched by the sweltering heat). Still, once you managed to get to the showgrounds, the show was really good. There were reasonably nice places to ride in the apple-filled countryside. And the party-like atmosphere was good too. Frankfurt has none of that. There’s no soul to the show in Frankfurt. Which isn’t so suggest going back to Friedrichshafen. Rather, finding some middle-ground between the concrete jungle of the Frankfurt convention center and the logistical nightmare of Friedrichshafen.

B) The big brands leaving: I’m not even talking about American bike companies like Specialized or such, that happened many years ago. Rather, more recent brands are leaving. SRAM in the last year or two, Shimano & Bosche this year, and far too many to count. By itself, no individual brand is super important to a show this big (after all, companies like Apple aren’t on-show at massive events like CES), but many big brands missing start to make a dent. Especially when the gist of the show was that all the cycling brands were at it.

C) The medium-sized brands left too: Let’s just take a look at the sports tech segment I cover. Obviously, there may well be journalists covering other segments that still get value out of the show (for example covering eMTB gearboxes). But, in my realm, let’s count my usual suspects that are not there this year:

1) Garmin/Tacx (was there all prior years)
2) SRAM/Hammerhead (was there until last year)
3) Shimano (was there all prior years)
4) Wahoo (was there all prior years, either on-floor or off-floor)
5) Elite (was there all prior years)
6) Magene (was there in recent years)
7) Bryton (was there in recent years)
8) Stages/Giant (was there all prior years)
9) Power2Max (was there last year)
10) 4iiii (was there all prior years, either on-floor or off-floor)
11) SRM (was there all prior years, either on-floor or off-floor)
12) All the smaller power meter companies (virtually none there now)
13) All the smaller aero sensor companies (I don’t think any this year)
14) Lezyne (was there all prior years, either on-floor or off-floor)
15) The major trainer apps: Zwift, Rouvy, MyWhoosh, TrainerRoad, Kinomap, etc… All these teams were onsite, even if only some of them had official booths, most had off-show booths for meetings. None were there, only icTrainer.

And again, that’s separate from other companies I’d be personally interested in talking to, like many (all the major?) cargo bike brands and such that disappeared. And beyond that, this skips over all the random sports-tech startups that sometimes made for interesting stories, too.

D) Product launch shift: As I’ve talked about for many years, for medium to bigger-sized brands, having a product launch at a trade show is mostly a dumb PR strategy. Your launch news is now shared amongst a gazillion other companies also announcing things. I remember back in 2019 at Eurobike, and having something like 14 full in-depth reviews, I had to somehow finish the morning of Eurobike launch (trainers, bike computers, power meters, even some watches). It never happened; some simply didn’t make the cut. And they were big-name companies that didn’t make the cut. Thus, companies shifted towards launching their products either at small private media events, or just by sending loaner units out.

E) Seasonality doesn’t matter anymore: It used to be that companies launched their products tied to the seasonality of Eurobike/Interbike, ahead of buying for the next season. For example, 10 years ago, you *always* launched new trainers in the August/September timeframe. Always, without fail. These days? You launch them whenever the heck you’re ready to ship. Consumers will buy it when they’re ready. People ride year-round, unlike skiing, which happens only a few months of the year.

F) The inclusion of non-bike micro-mobility: I’d actually argue that, as dumb as it was to have cars at a bike show, this was not what killed Eurobike. Nobody sat in their office and said: “The only reason I’m not going to Eurobike is because I saw an electric Fiat in a booth”. On social media, perhaps, but not in real life. Instead, it was first all the other items above that killed Eurobike. Having quads in booths, or 90KPH-rated electric vehicles on the bike test-track (as I actually saw yesterday) was just the icing on the cake.

Finally, I’d suggest going and reading Suvi’s piece over at Escape Collective on a lot of other factors. There are also some intra-Germany trade group organizational factors that contribute to it (though, I’d argue that by the time these groups got in on being upset, the above items were already the core factors).

And of course, there are aspects like how COVID ushered in more companies doing meetings and such digitally, but I actually don’t buy that as much here. After all, some other cycling shows/events are still just as popular as in the past. Escape noted the Rouleur Live show as a good example. And indeed, I went there a year or two ago, and it was fantastic. But you know what made it fantastic? I didn’t write anything about it.

I went, I met with everyone I knew in the industry to catch up on all the things. But there was no big product launch tied to it. Instead, it was the networking-like event that the industry wants, without the baggage of Eurobike. Consumers are welcomed, which gives it a marketing reason to exist for companies, while the tight confines of the venue means that individual booths are tiny (reducing costs).

Going Forward:

Now, about now, some of you may be saying, ‘Wait, Eurobike isn’t dead yet?!? They announced next year’s 2027 dates!’. And that’s true (now back in early September 2027). But equally true is that quietly announced the show won’t be coming back for 2028, and instead will attempt to shift to a every other year format starting in 2029. Of course, they didn’t issue that in a press release on their site, but rather, via a daily show notes that doesn’t go into the main press release feed.

The reality is that’ll likely never happen. Sometime later, fall or early winter, I can near guarantee you the Eurobike will quietly announce cancellation of the 2027 show as well. Companies won’t have signed up for it. Especially after they get word of this years event. Short of them managing to convince all the biggest brands, plus companies like those medium-sized brands to come to the show (and announcing this), nobody else will fall in line. This is exactly what happened to Interbike years ago.

Almost everyone I talked to at the show felt it was a “giant waste of time” (that’s an exact quote from one company in the list up above). And had it not been for the interesting Canyon concept bike I covered yesterday, I certainly would have been in the same camp. There are perhaps a few other small things I could cover from it that I had some chats with, but most of that was minor updates/etc, rather than something I’d normally write a whole piece on. Effectively, stuff worthy of a quick gallery mention, rather than a deeper piece. Again, media or retailers covering other product segments might have still found some value this year.

Still, it’s a shame, because the best part of Eurobike wasn’t the product launches or new tech – it was meeting with the people behind the products. The engineers, product people, and founders who put together all these cool pieces of tech, and understand how the products came to be, and their thinking on the future ahead. Most of the time, I already had the unannounced products in for review anyway. Instead, my time there was spent in meetings with people about cool new things coming out down the road, or sometimes, just hearing the industry gossip. Perhaps Rouler Live is the place for that next, or perhaps somewhere else. We’ll have to see.

With that – thanks for reading, and all the RV rental memories!

The sports tech pickings were slim at Eurobike this year, but one device stood out as the most interesting bit of sports technology: Canyon’s Predict smart bike concept. Even in years past, it still would have likely been at the top of the ‘interesting things’ stack, due to the heavy slate of technology it packs inside.

Still, I wanted to dive into all of the details, and walk through what’s real today, and what’s still a bit…futuristic. To my surprise, as you’ll see, the vast majority of the hardware is functional today – at least in a convention floor setting. But of course, what matters here is how it works out on the road. And a big part of that is the software.

After all, this is not Canyon’s first attempt at a smart bike. Some 11 years ago at Eurobike 2015 they announced a smart bike concept that also had a built-in bike computer, along with other sensors. It was promised to ship the following Spring 2016. It never did. Like most concept bikes tech promoted by larger bike brands, it quickly fell by the wayside.

Canyon says they’re hoping this might be out in 2-3 years, but will heavily depend on testing, and specifically they say whether consumers can trust the tech actually works out on the road. With that, let’s dive into it.

[Note: Canyon has been listed as a partner for DC Rainmaker for a few years, whereby they provide loaner bikes I can use to test other sports tech items on. No money exchanges hands. They didn’t ask me to write this post or video, I just thought it was cool sports tech. I’ll cover the pros and cons down below, like anything else I talk about.]

The Core Specs:

The Canyon Predict smart bike concept is currently in a road-bike form factor. It’s notable that Canyon also announced a commuter-style bike at Eurobike (Roadlite:ON V2X), that has bike to vehicle technology V2X. That bike is actually purchasable today, and theoretically talks to cars equipped with such technology. But it’s very different than the Canyon Predict, which doesn’t have V2X (because they want to do it without requiring the car to be equipped with V2X).

So, here’s the most notable bits of the bike, from a tech standpoint:

– 360* Camera Coverage: There are four cameras onboard, three up front and one at the rear, combined to have complete 360* camera coverage. This is very similar to what we see from both drones and cars that combine numerous cameras into a single cohesive picture of what’s going on around it.

– Four radar sensors: There are three radar sensors on the front of the bike (two side, one forwards), and then one rear radar sensor. The front set is there to detect objects as you approach and pass them, while the rear radar is there to detect overtaking vehicles. The rear radar is very similar to existing cycling radars, while the front radars are most focused on determining exact distances to objects.

– Onboard AI Edge Compute: Essentially, a big processing unit to combine all this data, processing it fully locally. There’s no dependency on connectivity (cellular or WiFi), instead, everything is processed locally for both privacy and speed/responsiveness reasons.

– Tire Pressure Sensors: These are inside the tire, and provide realtime pressure readings, which are in turn leveraged both both simple ‘are you running low on air’, as well as road grip suggestions (e.g. for rainy days). The wheels themselves are from DT Swiss, along with the hubs inside.

– 1KG (2.2lbs) Onboard Battery: No, this is not an eBike, this is *purely* for computational and powering tasks. That’s an absolutely massive battery to have on a bike for just powering all the cameras/radars/sensors/compute. The current battery claim is 8 hours, but that’s heavily likely to change before release (probably for the better, as things get more efficient).

– Front and Rear Lights on the frame: Pretty self-explanatory. They didn’t have any specific lumen specs yet, as that’d all be finalized later on. But you can see it’s a pretty big light bar on the back.

– Handlebar lights (mostly for the rider): These act as warning lights to the rider themselves, such as warning the rider to slow/stop due to a predicted issue up ahead (like car dooring, or pothole/manhole/etc).

– Extra handlebar buttons: In addition to regular shifting buttons, there’s also a secondary set of inner buttons on the handlebars that you can use for specific functions, including raising/lowering the saddle, turn signals, or ordering pizza (maybe…ok, probably not).

– SRAM RED groupset: This is what it was equipped with on the stand, but obviously, there’s no real dependency here on the groups. By time this bike ships it could be a different SRAM groupset, a Shimano groups, or something else entirely.

– Price & Timelines: There’s no price yet, and the timelines remain super vague. Still, Canyon hopes that perhaps in 2-3 years such a concept could be ready for production.

Got all that? Good, let’s dive into things more deeply.

A Closer Look:

Now, I’d encourage you to watch the video up above. I basically walk through each component of the bike with the lead hardware engineer at Canyon responsible for it. Lots of good tidbits in there.

Nonetheless, let’s step through it piece by piece from the front, moving backwards. First up, you can see the main forward lights just above the fork. There’s also two further white lights illuminated atop the handlebars.

Directly above the lights you can see through the plastic and barely see the front radar sensor as well as front cameras. These are used for detecting objects (vehicles/people/potholes/etc up ahead). At the show, they had a live feed showing what the cameras are seeing when it comes to detection and classification, as well as confidence %. This is *NOT* what the end user sees, but rather, just what the computer it seeing. In the video, you can see as people move out of the way, it keeps detecting the bike in the right of the frame (as a bike)

Instead, what the user sees is this handlebar display. Obviously, the very first question I had was whether or not this display was in partnership with the now ill-fated OnlyFans crowd-funded handlebar display I covered last year. In fact, I asked three different Canyon engineers, all separately, and every one of them said it definitely wasn’t. They were pretty insistent that they have no partnership or licensing there at all. Of course, despite that project, handlebar display concepts are hardly new in cycling. But still, many people would (rightfully) ask, especially given that both are German companies.

In any case, the display shows usual bike computer bits, such as speed/power/heart rate, as well as navigational bits. All of this is fairly demo-like. When asked whether or not this complements an existing bike computer or replaces it, Canyon said “It could replace it, in the long run…right now we’re just mostly focused on safety”.

I’d argue that creating a good bike computer that consumers actually want on their handlebars is an area that most companies underestimate. Heck, I think even some of the very companies making those bike computers have forgotten that recently.

Creating a *competitive* bike computer from scratch requires a boatload of different feature areas: Navigation, routing, re-routing, offline maps, structured workouts, sensor connectivity (e.g. power meters, cadence sensors, heart rate sensors, radar, lights, numerous other sensor types), climb-related metrics (e.g. ClimbPro), and literally hundreds of other features. It’s ‘easy’t make something like the above image that shows basic information. It’s really hard to make a bike computer that competes with what Garmin/Wahoo/Hammerhead/etc have been building for 10-15 years.

I feel like the better opportunity here, short to mid-term, is for Canyon to partner with a Garmin/Wahoo to basically build such a bike computer into their handlebars. But whether either side will overcome their egos to do so, would be a bigger question.

In any event, when it comes to forward predictive avoidance, the bike is pulling in the forward radar and camera sensors to put together that picture of what’s happening. From there it’s using the sensors in the bike (including steering tube sensors) to determine whether or not you’re on track to actually hit said thing. Meaning, if you turn such that your new angle is away from the danger (like a car door), it won’t flag that as an alert.

The system’s response time is 1/20th of a second (50ms), operating continuously. They noted that they will eventually look at how they can save battery by slightly reducing that. For example, if you’re riding on a simple empty road in the middle of empty farmland, they could reduce it down to 1/5th of a second, and likely save a bunch of battery (by reducing compute processing time).

The unit itself has full connectivity, but doesn’t require it for any actions. All of it is processed locally. They said this is for two core reasons. The first is privacy; they don’t want your imagery having to go to the cloud and be processed remotely. Canyon’s lead engineer noted how much they’re hearing today from customers about lack of trust in AI system and AI processing (from a privacy standpoint). Thus, everything is processed within the bike.

The second reason is simply responsiveness. To achieve that 50ms response/identification time, doing so across poor cellular connectivity simply isn’t viable.

Speaking of processing, the entire thing is dependent on a 1kg-sized battery inside the bike, which currently only gets them about 8 hours of battery time. They said not to overthink the battery life estimates right now, because a lot will change in terms of tech (and battery burn) in the next 2-3 years, including just their own optimizations. Also keep in mind this is powering the full stack of bike lights, cameras, radar, bike computer, GPS, etc…

Still, I feel like they should be shooting for around 12-15 hours of ride time, or essentially a full week’s worth of riding for most riders buying this time of bike.

Nonetheless, next up are the handlebars. This is a combination of a SRAM shifter, with their own handlebar. You can see the white light below, which also changes red, and will alert accordingly (see the video how that works). Likewise, there’s also a vibration motor planned in there, as well as audible alerts via the main display portion – just like any other bike computer.

But if you look you’ll also notice that silver button. That allows for activating left/right turn signals, as well as customization to enable moving the saddle up/down. The bike has an adjustable height saddle that can go up/down by simple button press (also shown in the video). The idea here being to allow for more stable (lower) positions while descending. If I were to bet on any piece that won’t make the final bike, it’s this. We’re not talking about a typical dropper post scenario that uses a spring, but rather, this is literally like a small elevator for your seat post. That’s electronically and mechanically costly, and fraught with complexity.

Towards the back of the bike they’ve got the rear light bar, as well as radar and camera packed above it.

Meanwhile, below it are the custom wheels from DT Swiss, which have a Canyon-designed tire pressure sensor in it (not designed by DT Swiss). Canyon says they can use this to give you warnings about not just tire pressure, but suggesting for dealing with road conditions (like rain) by changing tire pressure.

Finally, down below you’ve got the relatively straightforward SRAM RED groupset. As noted above, this will probably change by time this bike comes out, but for now it looks nice.

There ya go – a complete look at this bike from front to back. Again, there’s a fair number of bits in the video that are worthwhile diving into, showing how some of the features work in real-time.

The Stingr Smart Helmet:

I want to very briefly talk about the Stingr Smart helmet, which can operate with or without the bike. Likewise, the bike doesn’t require the helmet. The helmet is also very much in the ‘concept’ phase, without any prices or timelines. I’d actually guess that achieving such a helmet might be harder than the bike, especially once I saw the state of things (and, knowing the last decade+ of companies trying to make smart helmets/glasses).

As you can see above, the helmet has a heads-up display on the inside, showing live metrics from your ride, just like a bike computer would. This includes all the usual bits like speed/power/cadence/etc, but also directional stuff as well as warnings about vehicles and other dangers. Basically, much the same metrics as the Canyon Predict smart bike concept.

Except, as of today, the display isn’t real. Well, at least for the rider. Yes, the display seen on stand was real, and was showing people *outside* the helmet a video and photo-friendly real and changing set of metrics. But in reality, that display was actually kinda fake. It wasn’t for the rider. When you looked inside the helmet, there’s just foam there.

For context, over the years I’ve tried Recon Snow (2012+), Recon Jet (2013+), Google Glass (2014), Recon Jet (2013+), Garmin Varia Vision (2016), to the SOLOS glasses (2018), Everysight Raptor (2018),  FORM Swim Goggles (2019+), Oakley Vanguard (2025), and many more I never got around to writing about. And that ignores products like the Apple Vision Pro (2024).

Having talked to many companies over the years that work in this space of heads-up display space, what Canyon is trying to do is by far one of the most difficult things to do.

You have to find a way to project something against that glass that’s also visible to the end user in all sorts of lighting conditions. By having the foam backing in the demo, they’ve essentially removed the most difficult part of the problem. It’s like building a rocket that doesn’t have an engine/motor to launch to space.

But, we’ll set aside that for a brief second. Atop the helmet are also a set of lights that can be used as turn indicators, brake lights, or just general visibility. There’s also small white lights to the left/right of the large vent you see at the rear (they show illuminated/blinking in the video).

Inside the helmet there’s audio alerts as well as haptic (vibration) alerting.

Finally, up top there’s an implied solar panel, for powering it. Assuming they sort out the overall cooling elements (e.g. vents), putting a solar power atop your head is actually quite logical. Currently it’s slated for 8-15 hours of battery life.

Here’s a chart from Canyon showing all the features in the helmet (or at least, planned to be in the helmet):

Again, who knows what that’ll look like once it finally ships.

Wrap-Up:

In an ideal world, regulators would find ways to get drivers to be more aware of cyclists and pedestrians. But we don’t all live in the Netherlands, thus, pretending to ourselves that’s going to change doesn’t save lives. It simply doesn’t. I’m tired of watching cyclists I know get killed by drivers, and thus I’m more than happy for companies to try and do things that attempt to reduce the number of cyclists getting killed.

It is an unfortunate reality that certain (many?) countries will continue to have poor safety laws, bad or distracted drivers, or even bad road conditions. Many cyclists already use safety devices to try and mitigate some of those risks, such as rear-radar units. And others add safety cameras for post-incident evidence.

As cyclists we should continue to push for regulation changes, and hold bad drivers accountable. But equally, we can also be pushing for real-world solutions that safe our friends lives in the meantime. Sadly, no points awarded for coulda/shoulda/woulda when it comes to preventing cycling accidents. Thus, I’m all for whatever trusted tech can be put in place to prevent that, from any company. Whether or not Canyon can make this tech, or more challengingly, make it trustworthy, remains to be seen.

Finally, there’s the element of how well such a system would work long-term given everything is built-in. Meaning, could you swap out the handlebar or front sensors for a new version? Or would that require a new bike? I’d think swapping handlebars should be straightforward, but not if the main computing unit is somewhere else in the frame. Things that need to be decided and weighed by both Canyon and consumers.

With that – thanks for reading!

It’s back again – Amazon Prime Days. That means most Amazon country/regional properties are doing pretty substantial deals across the board on all sorts of products for now through Friday. As usual, deals last till they last.

Update! Here’s the Top 5 items you/DC Rainmaker Readers bought yesterday (these deals are all still live). I’d generally agree that these are among the top deals:

1) Garmin Epix Pro for $499 (with Flashlight/ECG/Sapphire Glass): Yeah, I’d agree this is probably one of the best deals in sports tech today. It’s impossible for any competitor to beat this price-to-features ratio, and even within the Garmin realm of newer units (the Fenix 8 Pro at $849, also on sale for $250 off), this is impossible to beat.

2) Garmin Edge 540 for $249: Like the Epix Pro above, this isn’t the newest version (that’s the Edge 550, which is also on sale, but for $399). Yet again, there’s simply no other competitor that can compete at this price point on features with the Edge 540. Not even close.

3) Apple AirPod Pro 3 for $179 (with optical heart rate too): Again, the theme here is ‘hard/impossible to beat’, and at this price point, these are just so good. It’s my daily driver for general music, workout music, editing videos (10 minutes ago), listening on the plane (last night), and more.

4) Anker 25,000 mAh battery bank for $91 (can power a laptop too): I’ll be honest, I didn’t think this would show up on the Top 5 list, but it’s yet again one of my favorite things. It’s sitting next to me in the hotel room right now, and it spent the day with me in my backpack. As it does every day. I love it, be it for travel or multi-day treks deep into the mountains. It can power drones, action cams, phones, laptops, and tons more.

5) DJI NEO 1 follow-me drone for $139: Seriously, this too is impossible to beat price-wise. Nothing comes close, let alone in features. Up until the DJI NEO 2 came out last fall, this was my go-to drone for sports follow-me features. It’s indestructible, and just does the one thing it needs to do: Follow you perfectly. Again, the theme of the top-5 here is “just works, impossible to beat deals”. This fits that.

Once again, this year’s deals are definitely better than last year’s deals. There are some very, very strong deals here. As I’ve said in the past, a June sale date for sports tech items is timed perfectly. That’s because typically in the sports tech realm, Black Friday deals are for ‘older’ things, rarely the ‘just announced’ stuff that often comes in the late August to October timeframe (especially wearables, cycling trainers, and action cams). But, with Amazon Prime Days being in late June, there’s more opportunity for brands to put things on sale. Typically speaking though, don’t expect to see sports tech things on sale that were announced this calendar year.

To take advantage of Amazon Prime Days, you simply need to be an Amazon Prime member. The good news is that you can sign-up for the free trial and cancel later if you don’t find value in it. Just hit up this giant banner below to do so:

I’ve organized all the best sports technology Amazon Prime Days deals (and a few others I’ve found) below in the tables by category. I’ll be updating them throughout the next two days. Keep in mind that not all deals last (in fact, most don’t). So, if you see something that’s hot, I’d strongly suggest buy now (and return later if need be).

With that, onto the deals! And thanks for supporting the site via the links below. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Enjoy!

Watches & Wearables:

This covers anything you can wear that’s watch-like or activity band-like, including sensors.  Generally speaking, you’ll mostly find deals here that are on things I’ve written about in the past.  So you won’t find a deal on some random non-sports tech watch here, or on socks. Unless the socks have some crazy sensor or something in them.

There are no deals currently.

Cycling Gear & Trainers:

Got a bike? Then this section is for you.  Everything from bike computers to bike lights to trainers, it’s all here.  I won’t generally be adding things like brake cables or bike seats here, but if I find a good deal on a cassette to stack on that new direct-drive trainer you just bought, I’ll probably list it here.

There are no deals currently.

And then here’s a separate bucket for trainers and indoor bikes:

	Product	Sale Price	Amazon	Sale Notes
	Lasko High Velocity Pro-Performance Fan - 15% off	$54	Amazon	This is one of the most popular indoor trainer fan companies out there, which rivals the Wahoo Headwind fan but cost a fraction of the price. Of course, it lacks ANT+/Bluetooth integration, but realistically if you really want that you can add a smart outlet for $10 to toggle it on/off from your phone if need be. It's one of the ones in my rotation.

Action Cameras & Drones:

Wanna record it?  No better way than an action camera.  Anything that’s action camera-related or drone-related, you’ll find here.  That’s especially true of action camera mounts, which are often found for great deals around the holidays.  Same goes with drones and drone accessories.  Usually a great time to pick up an extra battery or extra props.

There are no deals currently.

Other Sports & Fitness:

Anything else that’s sports and fitness-related that I think is interesting will be here.  It may not be super techy – but it’s stuff that most readers will be using in pursuit of their running/cycling/swimming/hiking/whatever.

There are no deals currently.

DCR Random Gadget List:

These are basically the mostly totally unrelated gadgets and things I think are cool deals that I’ve likely bought one or five of (you can never have too many, right)?  Some of it’s probably photography stuff.  Some of it’s random stuff like chargers and battery packs that I use daily, fun camera gear I use to make videos, like sliders and turntables, and well…just random things you’ll find around the DCR Cave.  It’s all random…but it’s all awesome randomness!

There are no deals currently.

Europe Folks Note: I’ve tried in the past to keep track of all the separate Amazon European sites, and honestly, I have given up. With 100+ products on the US list, and then cross-checking each one manually across each country…has proven impossible. That said, you can click any link and, in theory (strong hopefully theory), it’s often also on sale in the EU sites.

With that – thanks for reading, and for supporting the site via the links above.

Eurobike starts tomorrow in Frankfurt, and the annual bike show is known for packing in surprise announcements worth checking out. I’ve made the annual trek to Eurobike for more years than I can remember, but I expect this year to be the least exciting since I started going. There are a lot of merging reasons for that, some related, some not. More on that in a second.

Still, this post is simple – with only a day on the ground planned, if you see/hear of something super interesting in the sports tech space, drop a note in the comments below! I’ll go check it out and see if it’s worth deeper digging.

When it comes to announcements, I don’t expect any notable ones from the usual sports tech group cycling companies (e.g., the ones that make most bike computers in the western markets, power meters, and such). I do expect we’ll probably see some announcements from Magene/Bryton/etc, as we usually do. Though oftentimes most of those initial announcements were made at Asian bike shows over the past 4-6 weeks. Nonetheless, usually a few things slip out here.

The reason we’re seeing so few announcements in my specific space is a blend of two mostly separate things. First and most critically: Large companies have shifted away from trade shows to announce new products. It just doesn’t make sense because their announcements get drowned in the noise of competing with thousands of other companies. Further, they can have separate (small) media events elsewhere and get more focused time with the products than a 15-minute interrupted booth walk-through can provide.

The second reason is Eurobike ‘had a moment’ over the last year+, where the big bike brands left, due to fundamental disagreements on a whole host of issues related to the show’s format since it moved to Frankfurt. It sounds like those are perhaps on the mend, but we won’t really know till next year.

Setting all that aside….

So far, on my to-visit list, the most interesting sports-tech thing is Canyon’s new Predict system concept. The bike is outfitted with 360° cameras, sensors, and radar, and then claims to use AI and to predict/detect things like someone opening a car door up ahead in front of you.

All of which is displayed on the integrated handlebar computer up front. That handlebar is vaguely similar to the one on the crowd-funded OnlyFans failboat I covered last year. Nothing has changed in that project, fwiw.

I have many questions about the above, and I suspect there won’t be a whole lot of concrete answers for everything, but hey…that’s what trade shows are typically for. Fun times!

In any case, the point being, if you see something on the interwebs worth checking out during the day, just drop a quick comment down below and I’ll keep checking the comments section! With the show being as massive as it is, and most of the coolest things this year likely coming from a small/unknown booth, it’s often hard to spot unless someone tells you! And yes, if you’re a company in the sports-tech realm at Eurobike, you can drop a comment too if you’re announcing something cool. Uncool things need not apply.

With that – thanks for reading!

It’s time for another rabbit hole post. Or at least, a small rabbit hole post.

This one is spurred on by a random comment thread on the recent COROS Watch Bricking Post. The gist of things was a debate saying the COROS Dura had far better battery life, and thus all the ultra bike folks were switching to it. Setting aside COROS’s (clever) sponsoring/ambassadorships of a number of ultra bike-packing folks, I was curious what the data would say. Both units have solar panels, and both are the longest battery bike GPS units on the market (by a massive margin).

After all, I’d tested this off and on over the past few years – though not always directly. But I had plenty of COROS Dura data that I roughly know what the battery burn looked like in hot and sunny summer days, cool and overcast winter days, and basically everything in between. And I knew it for both navigation and non-navigation scenarios. Likewise, I had years of data from the Garmin Edge 1040 Solar, prior to mostly switching to newer devices. The Edge 1040 Solar was announced in June 2022, while the COROS Dura announced in June 2024.

Now, I don’t want to dive into features here (the Edge 1040 Solar would win in a landslide in literally every possible category), nor price (inversely, the COROS Dura would win in a landslide there, priced at $249 vs the $699 for the Edge 1040 Solar), or anything else that would distract from the item at hand (for the moment anyway).

Instead, I just want to look at the battery. In my past tests over the past few years, the general gist of it is as follows:

COROS Dura: Tends to burn at 2%/hour in all my riding conditions regardless of features enabled (e.g. navigation enabled), but can recoup about 1%+ /hour with solar power gains.

Edge 1040 Solar: The burn rate is kinda all over the map here, going from (also) 2%/hour to far higher depending on what you’ve enabled, and can recoup what seems like about 0.5%/hour (it doesn’t’ specify this exactly, but gives minutes instead, so it’s kinda wonky to see solar recoup amounts).

As always with most things, what you’ve enabled will drive battery burn. In the case of Garmin, they simply have more things to enable. And likewise, even when comparing Garmin to COROS for features they both have (e.g. ClimbPro-like things), Garmin’s feature is far deeper, and shows far more on the screen than COROS’s. So again, there are trade-offs to be made. Pretending those don’t exist would be silly, but we aren’t going to dive into them today. Simply acknowledge them, and move on.

The Settings:

Now, I tried to get these as close as possible for today’s 3hr+ ride. Here’s the gist of what the settings were:

Navigation: This was enabled for today, with a route created in Strava and pushed to both units, following navigation, with re-routing enabled. I would go rogue for about 45-minutes, forcing the devices to re-route. Navigation alerts would appear on both devices accordingly. That said, the COROS Dura failed (repeatedly) to re-route, despite having connectivity to both app and internet, so this probably (positively) assisted it for 45 minutes.

Sensors: Both devices would be connected to the same chest strap and power meter pedals. No other sensors were connected for this ride (I didn’t connect radar, cause I didn’t want to hear three different bike computers chirping radar alerts at me for three hours).

Data page: Both units were configured to show me 7 data fields on a single page, with the same HR/cadence/power/distance/time/etc data. That said, when units would automatically detect/show ClimbPro-like pages, Iet them ride with that to the top the climb, at which point I’d get back to the main data page I had configured.

Backlight settings: I set it for ‘Auto’ on the Edge 1040 Solar, and left it as defaults on the COROS Dura.

Bluetooth/Phone: Both were connected to my phone, with both configured to send LiveTrack sessions to my wife (which, both did). Note though, the COROS device did fail to update the LiveTrack for a nearly 45-minute long section, for no obvious reason. When I closed and re-opened the app on my phone, it started sending again. This probably (positively) impacted COROS Dura battery life a tiny bit.

Everything else: Best I could make it, everything else was set as defaults. I wouldn’t claim this as a scientific test, but then again, most people that do such things in this field rarely make it scientific anyway. But I tried to make it as equal as I could think of.

In any case, I also had a Wahoo ROAM V3 with me, but that burns battery like a blowtorch, so it’s not competing in today’s race. It was along for the ride to test out the expanded body temperature sensor bits I posted about earlier.

Here’s the starting point for all three units:

As you can see: The COROS Dura at 53%, the Garmin Edge 1040 at 54%, and Wahoo ROAM V3 at 47%. Oh, and in case someone asks what the green stuff is on the edge of the Edge 1040 Solar is (my wife asked), I don’t exactly know. It spent the winter in a metal bin that’s undercover but still outside, and had some batteries mixed in said bin. Something corroded or whatever nearby it. It’s just external cosmetic damage, but obviously, it’s still a 4-year old unit that’s “seen some things” in its life. It wouldn’t have any impact on the test.

The Ride:

With that, out I went into a clear-blue sunny day. For context, the ride was in Mallorca Spain, in mid-June, on what was thus far the hottest day of the calendar year. The on-road temps from the Garmin & Wahoo devices were floating in the 42-46*C range, or 107*F-115*F. The COROS Dura showed about 1-2*C cooler. Those are the temps showing the ambient above-pavement/road temperature. Slightly cooler elsewhere.

Anyways, fast-forwarding to 83 minutes into the ride, and here’s how things look (below). The Garmin Edge 1040 Solar has lost 1%, the COROS Dura has lost 1%, and the Wahoo ROAM V3 has gobbled up 10%.

From there I kept on chugging. About 15 minutes after that, the COROS Dura lost the phone connection for a bit (so LiveTracking stopped for it),and then about 15 further minutes later, I purposefully went off-route (because I was going too quick for my planned 3-hour route, and needed to add an extra/bigger climb). As noted above, the COROS Dura failed to re-route, and even after I re-opened the phone, and it was showing live text messages coming in on the app, it would fail to re-route. There was no re-routing issues on the other units, though, both were consistently displeased with my choice not to just turn around. The route below through the mountains, done clockwise.

Now, some 3 hours and 15 minutes later, right before pressing stop, here’s how things stood. The COROS Dura was at 51% (from 53%), the Garmin Edge 1040 Solar at 51% (from 54%), and the Wahoo ROAM V3 at 11% (from…umm…47%):

(The ‘Total Ride Time’ shown here on the COROS is prior to pressing save since last charge, so it includes a previous 1hr ride, but not yet my current 3hr ride)

What’s kinda neat on the COROS screen, is you can see more precise numbers on the charge. This is one of the ‘big’ challenges with battery burn testing, is that most of the time you only get whole numbers (e.g. 54% instead of 53.7%), so things get rounded a fair bit. When you’re looking at burn rates like Wahoo’s,  it’s not a big deal. But when you look at devices with burn rates like COROS or Garmin’s Solar units, then it can be a significant difference in battery estimates. Literally just 1-2 minutes one way or the other can swing an estimate a massive amount.

That’s why, for battery burn tests, I like to have many, many hours (for watches, often 8-12 hours on a single go). But doing so on a bike in this weather isn’t super viable. If not due to the weather, then my back. 😂

After pressing save, you can see more details on both. The COROS Dura lost 5.7% during the ride (consistent with what I’ve seen of about 2%/hour), but gained about 3.9% back in Solar gains. Thus, it lost a total 2% (or 1.8% to be precise, because it shows it).

Meanwhile, the Garmin Edge 1040 Solar gained back 1hr and 9 minutes worth of riding time, or roughly about 1/3rd of the riding time back. As you’ve probably realized, Garmin shows the time gained in hours/minutes, whereas COROS shows it in % of battery. Neither do the opposite. Garmin also shows where the solar power was gained throughout the ride (that red chart). They show this during the ride too. The reason it says average intensity is 100%, is that’s based on a set baseline value, and then you can go above that on really sunny days (like today).

Unfortunately, COROS still doesn’t write the battery information to the file like everyone else does, so we can’t plot that easily. Garmin, Wahoo, Hammerhead, and many others all write that information to the .FIT file each time the value changes. This allows for nifty charts like this, using the DCR Analyzer:

(The above chart shows the slight challenge of whole-numbers. As we can see, the Edge 1040 is basically dropping 1% every 1hr 20mins, so had I ridden another 30-40 minutes, it’d still show the same %, but ultimately show a longer battery estimate – perhaps 120-135hrs. The same logic would apply inversely to any unit as well, had it been stopped immediately after the whole number changed. I know people like a clickbait headline, but there’s often real-world nuance to how the test is calculated/done that can heavily sway it one way or another.)

It’s a shame COROS doesn’t write the data to the file, or even go one step further than Garmin and write the 0.x% value too. Since frankly, it’d make their devices look pretty good in almost every scenario. They tend to have some of the longest battery life out there (again, there are real-world trade-off reasons for that, but from a pure marketing standpoint, stick the battery data in the file for an easy win).

In any case, the simple answer here is that on this day, with navigation enabled, the Garmin Edge 1040 Solar was trending towards 108 hours per battery charge with *today’s* solar gains (.92%/hour), while the COROS Dura would have been on track for 156 hours with *today’s* solar gains (0.64%/hour). Note, for this simple calculation, I used the whole-number data shown on the main screens, rather than the 0.x% data shown, as Garmin doesn’t show that, so we don’t exactly know where it stands. Likewise, as noted earlier, remember the COROS Dura refused to re-route, and failed hold the LiveTrack session for about 45 minutes. I don’t expect that drove major changes there to battery life, but certainly would have shifted it up a tiny bit.

With that – go forth and enjoy your silly-long rides!

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Hopefully you found this review/post useful. At the end of the day, I’m an athlete just like you looking for the most detail possible on a new purchase – so my review is written from the standpoint of how I used the device. The reviews generally take a lot of hours to put together, so it’s a fair bit of work (and labor of love). As you probably noticed by looking below, I also take time to answer all the questions posted in the comments – and there’s quite a bit of detail in there as well.

If you're shopping for the COROS Dura or Garmin Edge 1040 Solar or any other accessory items, please consider using the affiliate links below! As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchases help support this website a lot.

COROS Dura

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Garmin Edge 1040 Solar

Amazon

And of course – you can always sign-up to be a DCR Supporter! That gets you an ad-free DCR, access to the DCR Shed Talkin' video series packed with behind the scenes tidbits...and it also makes you awesome. And being awesome is what it’s all about!

Thanks for reading! And as always, feel free to post comments or questions in the comments section below, I’ll be happy to try and answer them as quickly as possible. And lastly, if you felt this review was useful – I always appreciate feedback in the comments below. Thanks!

A few weeks back, Wahoo announced a slate of new and expanded sensor connectivity options. Specifically, they greatly expanded the CORE temperature sensor integration to include far more data fields, and then they added support for FLOWBIO and hDrop hydration sensors, as well as Tymewear breathing sensors.

While Wahoo previously had CORE sensor integration (for many years), it was substantially less ‘integrated’ than Garmin or CORE’s native app. This integration puts it in roughly the same camp as Garmin’s integration (though Garmin does some things Wahoo doesn’t, and vice versa, more on that in a second).

The announcement for the firmware update was back on June 2nd, but it finally went live last week, and I’ve been playing with it on rides over the weekend, notably with the CORE sensor…and on some steamy hot rides.

Note that all of these are for the V3 units only: Wahoo ELEMNT ROAM v3, Wahoo ELMENT BOLT V3, and Wahoo ELMENT ACE. It does not apply to older units.

The CORE Integration:

First up, I just want to briefly go through the CORE integration, since that’s the one I’ve spent the most time with. To begin, you’ll obviously need to update your unit. Once that’s done, you’ll go and pair to the CORE sensor in the event you’re not already paired. In my case, it was already paired to the CORE sensor, and thus, I didn’t need to do anything further from a sensor standpoint.

Next, you’ll want to create your own data page (or update an existing one), to add the data fields you want. There’s a boatload of them here that are now available via the CORE sensor. Here’s a quick screenshot of them:

The ones in grey (above), are the ones I’ve selected already (as seen on the far right option), including other fields like 3-second power, heart rate, and outside temperature.

I kinda wish Wahoo had offered a simple toggle to create a ‘Hot AF Page’ with a mirror image of what they put in the support article, that had all of the data pages on there in one shot. It’s a good way of doing it. I ended up manually creating that layout, but a simple toggle would have been handy.

Now, I need to give someone at Wahoo some serious street cred here. Whoever was responsible for the Wahoo support page on the CORE Body sensor integration needs a raise. This is the most thorough support page that they, or any of their competitors, have ever written on a topic. It’s mind-bogglingly good. This person needs a raise. Go read it, super detailed!

In any case, out on my ride I went. From here I’m able to see my CORE body temperature, skin temperature, heat zones, and everything else under the literal sun on one page. Obviously, you don’t need to put it on that page, but hey, I did.

Despite using the CORE body temperature sensor on and off for more years than I can count, this was really the first time I was able to see (quickly and easily) the direct relationship between core body temperature, skin temperature, heat zones, and ascending/descending (on a bike). Obviously, as I’m ascending, I’m working harder, and my body temperature was slowly rising. But as I descended, my skin temperature would be the leading indicator dropping much faster than my core body temperature, but as it did that, it quickly shifted my heat zones downwards as well. After which, my core body temperature would decline later in the descent. Rinse/repeat. In fact, that very article included a handy little chart showing this a bit:

For example, you can see here that after I had been descending for a while, my heat strain index dropped pretty quickly (the photo above was then taken at the top of the next climb).

I never really noticed this as much before for a few reasons. First, I never really had all those data fields on a single page. And second, I would tend to run with it on hotter days more than ride with it, and the cooling trends there aren’t as obvious as they are when riding (cause you work a heck of a lot more running downhill than coasting downhill on a bike).

Anyways, the only moderate downside here is that the data doesn’t sync back to CORE’s platform automatically. Wahoo writes the data to a .FIT file, which is sent to partners, but CORE hasn’t completed any integration there with Wahoo. Therefore, that data doesn’t get pushed to the CORE platform as it does for Garmin. Given how easy Wahoo’s made their API integration pieces (we added it last Friday to the DCR Analyzer, and it was by far the quickest API approval and integration we’ve done to date), hopefully CORE can do the same.

In any event, the on-device bits are cool stuff!

Flowbio, hDrop, Tymewear Integrations:

I don’t have either Flowbio or hDrop sensors on-hand, though both are designed to monitor fluid loss in slightly different ways. The general gist of it though, is to measure both fluid loss and sodium loss during your workouts, and then from there you can plan your hydration strategy accordingly. Both have reached out, so I suppose now is probably the time of year here in Spain to have fun testing some of these side-by-side with my wife (and by ‘have fun’, I mean getting naked, measuring yourself before/after, including all fluids/etc that you consume during the workouts).

I’ve previously tested the Nix Hydration sensors, and found it a hot mess of a product producing inaccurate results for myself, my wife, and another athlete – in a huge slate of 20+ very methodical and parameter-controlled hot-weather tests we did over months (but have been waaaay behind on writing up the full review). At the time, Nix confirmed there was nothing wrong with the protocol, nor my results, but simply that all three of us were apparently heavy-sweat outliers.

In any case, not to get distracted, here’s a quick look at the two sensors. Flowbio first:

And then hDrop:

And then here’s what the data looks like on the Wahoo units for the hydration sensors (along bottom):

Next, here’s the Tymewear breathing sensor, which looks similar to a heart rate strap, but actually has tiny strain gauges inside it.

And then likewise, here’s what the data looks like on the Tymewear sensor:

Ultimately, it’s cool to see Wahoo not just adding native support for sensors (since they lack any sort of App Store for their platform), but frankly, it’s cool to see them adding anything at all to the now 1-year old Wahoo ELMENT v3 (+ACE) series of devices, which haven’t really seen any meaningful new feature updates since last summer (and even the summer updates were mostly just fixing all the launch issues). I really hope this trend continues though!

With that – thanks for reading!

Found This Post Useful? Support The Site!

Hopefully you found this review/post useful. At the end of the day, I’m an athlete just like you looking for the most detail possible on a new purchase – so my review is written from the standpoint of how I used the device. The reviews generally take a lot of hours to put together, so it’s a fair bit of work (and labor of love). As you probably noticed by looking below, I also take time to answer all the questions posted in the comments – and there’s quite a bit of detail in there as well.

If you're shopping for the Wahoo BOLT V3, Wahoo ROAM V3 or Wahoo ELEMNT ACE or any other accessory items, please consider using the affiliate links below! As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchases help support this website a lot.

Wahoo BOLT V3

Amazon Competitive Cyclist REI

Wahoo ROAM V3

Amazon Competitive Cyclist REI

Wahoo ELEMNT ACE

Amazon Backcountry Competitive Cyclist REI

And of course – you can always sign-up to be a DCR Supporter! That gets you an ad-free DCR, access to the DCR Shed Talkin' video series packed with behind the scenes tidbits...and it also makes you awesome. And being awesome is what it’s all about!

Thanks for reading! And as always, feel free to post comments or questions in the comments section below, I’ll be happy to try and answer them as quickly as possible. And lastly, if you felt this review was useful – I always appreciate feedback in the comments below. Thanks!