Best motorcycle phone mount | Quad-Lock vs SP Connect vs Peak Design & more

Using your mobile phone as a sat-nav for route guidance can be a quick, convenient and – in some cases – money-saving way to find the fastest or most scenic motorcycle riding routes. In this article we’ll look at which is the best brand of phone mount for motorbike use based on in-depth, unbiased reviews of Quad Lock, SP Connect, Peak Design and more.

And we’ll find out why fitting your smartphone to the bike’s handlebars isn’t always a good idea…

Why you can trust this buying guide

No manufacturers or distributors ever have any influence on the reviews I write or film, I won’t ever do any paid reviews, we don’t have any advertisers to consider and I’ll never agree to affiliate links. All products are tested fairly and equally, and if anything changes over time, I will update the written reviews.

Your purchasing choices should always be your own – Bennetts BikeSocial is just here to help ensure they’re informed choices.

The good and bad of using a smartphone on your bike

Using a smartphone instead of a dedicated sat-nav like a Tom-Tom Rider, Garmin XT2 or Beeline Moto II can potentially save you money (though mounts and cases can get expensive) and you have access to a wide range of software, but it’s not always the best option…

The best motorcycle phone mount

We’ll cover the disadvantages and problems of mounting your mobile phone onto your  motorbike’s handlebars – and offer some solutions – later in this buying guide, but first let’s look at the best mobile phone mounting systems based on our reviews…

Peak Design | Based on several years of riding while using various different phone mounts, my choice of the best system is Peak Design due to its solid and simple locking mechanism. Being able to just snap your phone on in the horizontal or vertical position, then lift it off with one press is much easier than the competition. Vibration dampening is included as standard in the mounts.

The cases are high quality and very slim, despite being supremely secure. There is a slight question mark hanging over how protective they are compared to others though, as shown in the review linked below.

I’m not impressed with the wireless charging mounts offered by Peak Design, as in my experience the sample I was supplied wasn’t reliable with the Android devices I tested, and despite talking directly to Peak Design in the USA and its American PR company, the problems weren’t resolved. UK distributor Motohaus has recently confirmed that it’ll be handling Peak Design, so I’ll update this guide if I get better results in future.

• Click here for Peak Design review

• Phone case: £32.99-£49.99

• Phone models: Apple, Samsung Galaxy, Google Pixel

• Universal case adaptor: £28.99

• Single bar mount: £99.99 (with anti-vibration)

• Anti-vibration: Included

• Number of motorcycle mounting options: 6

• Universal strap bar mount: £47.99

• Alternative mounts offered by Evotech Performance: Yes

Older SP Connect mounts and cases had the straight lugs, but since 2023 they’ve gone over to the curved versions

SP Connect | These mounts are the most compact of those I’ve tested (when used without a vibration dampener) and give a very secure fit with a relatively slim case. Value is pretty good (and you can usually get 10% off on the SP Connect website), plus there’s a decent range of mounting options, including ‘Pro’ all-aluminium mounts and cheaper glass-reinforced plastic.

Mounting the phone takes a bit of a knack, but it’s slightly easier than Quad Lock. Both though are eclipsed by Peak Design’s system. The disadvantage with this system – which requires a 90° turn of the phone to mount it – is that you have to decide when fitting the bracket which orientation you’re going to use the phone. This doesn’t bother me as I don’t tend to want to swap around,  but that 90° turn can be limiting if space is tight.

If you want anti-vibration you’ll need to add an optional head at £29.95 to the mount. It adds a bit of extra size but it’s still a neat design that doesn’t look too obvious on the bike.

The SPC+ mounting system that was released early in 2023 is now the standard with SP Connect, with older mounts requiring a £4.99 adaptor, or replacement of the mount’s head at the same price.

• Click here for SP Connect review

• Phone case: £39.95

• Phone models: Apple, Samsung Galaxy, Google Pixel, Xiaomi 13, iPad Mini 6 & 7

• Universal case adaptor: £24.95

• Single bar mount: £49.95

• Anti-vibration: £29.95

• Number of motorcycle mounting options: 10

• Universal strap bar mount: £29.95

• Alternative mounts offered by Evotech Performance: Yes

Quad Lock | Coming third in this list doesn’t mean Quad Lock is bad by any stretch, but the competition has got tough over the years. There’s a wide range of mounting options available with plenty of customisation options, and Quad Lock offers the best value for money.

The cases – especially the newer magnetic-mount compatible ones – are more bulky than those offered by Peak Design and SP Connect, but there are a lot to choose from.

Clipping the phone to the Quad Lock mount only requires a 45° turn, which is better in tight spaces than the SP Connect, and like the Peak Design you can choose whether to pop your phone on in landscape or portrait orientations.

As with SP Connect, 10% discounts tend to be readily available on the Quad Lock website.

• Click here for Quad Lock review

• Phone case: £25.99-£31.99

• Phone models: Apple, Samsung Galaxy, Google Pixel, Huawei P40/Pro, iPad Mini 6 & 7

• Universal case adaptor: £11.99 - £15.99

• Single bar mount: £39.99

• Anti-vibration: £15.99

• Number of motorcycle mounting options: 9

• Universal strap bar mount: £22.99

• Alternative mounts offered by Evotech Performance: Yes

The three market leaders have quite different cases. As this will be something you’re handling all the time, it’s an important consideration

Other ways to mount your smartphone

Our buying guides are always based on products we’ve reviewed, but there are other options available that we haven’t tested...

• RAM X-Grip, around £65 | The RAM X-Grip is a universal design with a pair of sprung claws that grip your phone, so there’s no need to worry about what case you have. It’s not an elegant-looking system compared to some of the alternatives, and it’s probably wise to ensure that the wind can’t get under the phone and lift it out at high speed. Simon Hargreaves is a fan of the one he has, but did make it more secure:
  “I’ve used it on various bikes for about ten years, but fairly soon modified it by removing the rubber grippers and bending the arms over so that they clamp tightly around the rugged Love Mei cases I use on my phones. This creates a vice-like grip that’s seen the phone stay in place despite being mounted upright in the wind at 140mph on track.” For more details of the RAM X-Grip, click here.

Simon Hargreaves has used a RAM X-Grip for many years, and has modified it for more security

• Oxford Cliqr, £14.99 case adaptor and mount | Oxford’s Cliqr is a universal adaptor that sticks to the back of your phone and has a variety of mounting options. It seems very good value, and is claimed to offer 40kg of pull strength from the 3M adhesive-mounted adaptor, the company backing it up with independent testing that’s accessible via the website. We’ve not tested it, but you can find out more about the Oxford Cliqr range here.

• Interphone Quiklox, £29.99 mount | With a good range of mounts, the Interphone Quiklox looks rather similar to Quad Lock’s system. We haven’t tested it, but you can find out more about Quiklox here.

• Ulitimateaddons Universal Waterproof Case, £29.99 case, £49.99 mount | Available in L, XL and XXL sixes, these cases promise to provide a fully waterproof seal over the phone without compromising the touchscreen. The quality of fit will of course vary, and mounting options are a little more limited compared to the competition, with prices at £49.99 to £54.99. If you tend to always have a similar-sized phone this could save you having to buy new cases when upgrading, and the protection against the elements is superior. A limited range of dedicated phone cases are also available. For more details of the Ultimateaddons phone cases, click here.

• Bike It Universal Essential Quick Hold & Release Phone Holder, £11.99 | Fitting bars from 22 to 32mm this bracket cups the corners of your phone. We haven’t tested the Bike It, but you can find out more here.

• Mous IntraLock, £44.99 case, £39.99 mount | The Mous Intralock system hasn’t really taken off in the face of stiff competition, and there’s only a 1” ball mount and a bar mount available. Given that the bar mount has dropped from £79.99 to £39.99, and the relatively limited range of cases available, this doesn’t appear to be an ecosystem that will be expanding in future. Mous offers far more cases without IntraLock, focussing more on MagSafe compatibility, and the universal IntraLock adaptor is out of stock at the time of writing, after being reduced from £11.99 to £7.99. For more details of Mous cases, click here.

• Tank bag with a clear pocket | Tank bags can be great (my favourite is the SW Motech system thanks to its neat and effective tank locking ring), and putting your phone in can keep it safe. But touch-screen sensitivity can be impaired even with bags that have windows designed for it, and you have to take your eyes a long way off the road.

How to charge your phone on a motorcycle

One of the biggest issues with mounting your smartphone to your motorcycle is with charging. USB-C (and old Apple Lightning) ports are pretty resilient, and many phones now have good water-resistance, but these sockets can still be damaged by driving rain. My Samsung Galaxy S21 had problems with charging after a long ride in wet weather that got worse over several months until I eventually had to replace the port (which fortunately wasn’t too hard on this phone).

The obvious alternative is to fit a wireless charger to your bike, but this generates a lot of heat and I’ve found that in hotter climates the phone will soon stop accepting a charge this way, leaving it to deplete quickly due to the inevitably high screen brightness required in the sun. They’re not all created equally either, and while the Peak Design wireless charger is claimed to work well with iOS devices, it failed to reliably charge the Android phones I tested.

While vibration can cause damage to the charging port too – and it’s certainly not a rugged charging method – I prefer to stick with wired power when I use my phone on a long journey with the bike, either from a USB-port mounted near the phone, or a power-bank in my tank bag.

Just make sure the cable doesn’t get in the way of the steering.

Reasons not to mount your phone to your bike

Using your smartphone for navigation can have plenty of advantages, but here are some reasons you might not…

• Phone screens don’t like the rain. You may have a water-resistant phone, but water droplets bouncing off the screen can cause havoc with the software; I’ve watched Google maps suddenly plot a new route while riding in heavy rain. Trying to keep the phone sheltered behind the bike’s screen could help while riding, but when you stop the rain will likely still fall on it. My solution ended up being to turn the screen off then listen to the directions on my Bluetooth intercom, but there are apps like Touch Lock for Android, or use ‘Guided Access’ on an iPhone to disable the touchscreen.

• You might lose or damage your phone. It’s not such a concern when you’re close to home or in relatively built-up areas, but head out into the wilds – or a foreign country – and you’ll soon realise just how much we rely on our phones; besides payment apps, personal accounts etc, on a trip we might be using them for translation, mapping and keeping in touch. If the phone gets damaged while you’re out, at best you’ll face a lot of hassle. At worst… well, that’s why most adventure and big touring riders don’t use their main smartphone mounted on the bars.

• You might not be able to reach your phone in a crash. Something you do unfortunately have to consider is that if you’re in a crash it’s better to have your phone with you than on your bike, which could end up a long way from where you might be laying.

One way around most of the concerns of using your main smartphone for navigation is to use an older, less-valuable device in addition to your main phone. It could be one you’ve upgraded from, or one you pick up cheaply, but check the minimum requirements of the software you want to use and compare it to the maximum operating system that the phone can support.

Is it safe to mount your phone to your motorcycle?

Vibration needs considering when mounting your smartphone on the bike; many people think it’s just the cameras that get damaged, and while around 95% of these issues are reported to have involved Apple smartphones – mostly the iPhone X, 11 and 12 before sensor-shift optical image stabilisation was introduced – using anti-vibration mounts might not be the answer to the problem, and there could, theoretically, be more damage being done over time…

I spoke to Dr Tom Mansfield, a chartered engineer with the Institute of Engineering and Technology, whose roles in the past have seen him developing complex electronic devices for use in highly aggressive environments.

“It’s very possible that the life of a smartphone could be reduced due to mounting it onto a motorcycle,” he told me.

I mounted my phone to my 1999 Kawasaki ZX-6R (inline-four engine) and my 2019 BMW R1250GS (Boxer twin engine) using Quad Lock and SP Connect mounts (I didn’t have a Peak Design at the time) both with and without vibration dampeners, then recorded the vibrations with the engines running but the bikes at a standstill using the Resonance vibration analysis app and sent the data to Dr Mansfield…

“We’re looking at the vibration caused only by the engine here, as road surfaces will vary massively and will be influenced by the bike’s suspension. The engine vibration is something we can more easily measure, and it’s also a constant when riding that’s more likely to have the potential to cause damage to electronic components due to its wide frequency distribution.

“Looking at the indicative data from the Kawasaki’s engine, at idle with the phone mounted solidly to the bike’s front fairing brace very little vibration was transferred to it – certainly well within the bounds of what would usually be considered ‘safe’. Adding the anti-vibration dampeners reduced it even more, the SP Connect performing the better of the two.

“The ‘lumpy’ BMW Boxer Twin on the other hand transferred a lot more vibration energy to the phone. The Quad Lock was the better performing dampener this time, though both struggled to reduce the peaks. And the overall energy was actually higher when using the vibration dampeners on this bike with the engine at idle.

“Based on Highly Accelerated Life Testing principles, the vibration that the GS causes to the phone could be argued to translate into one hour’s ride being the equivalent of one month’s normal wear and tear on an average phone. Or to put it another way, one hour of commuting every day on a Boxer Twin for a year could be equivalent to 22 years of a phone’s life.

“If you’re worried about phone reliability, maybe don’t attach it to a bike with a lumpy engine like this, even with a vibration dampener. Though to be fair it’ll only accelerate faults that would have caused it to fail eventually anyway.”

My Samsung Galaxy S10 camera’s image stabilisation was messed up after being mounted onto a Kawasaki W800 (parallel-twin engine) a few years ago, but it recovered after being rebooted. Michael Mann’s iPhone 11 camera broke completely after he fitted it to a Ducati Hypermotard 950 (V-twin engine).

You can see Dr Mansfield’s full analysis below, but after watching my phone shake on the GS during testing, seeing the potential for harm in the data, and given the other disadvantages, I only fit my main phone to my motorcycle when I really need to.

Of course, phones will vary and some are ruggedised, but for navigation I prefer to use a dedicated device that’s designed to endure the harsh environment of a motorcycle, unless I have no alternative.

Dr Tom Mansfield’s analysis in full

Vibration and accelerated aging in electronic assemblies has been an active research topic since the 1960s, but is still not well characterised, even with good sensors and detailed design information, so we have to understand that there are limitations to the data gathered here…

Reliability and failure in typical electronic assemblies

Electronic devices typically follow a ‘bathtub curve’ of failure over their life. This change in failure rate is caused by the following:

• Early life failures are typically a result of production issues like poorly formed solder joints, PCB errors, components not being properly aligned etc…

• End of life / wear-out failures are usually caused by corrosion, fatigue etc…

When these two failure models are overlayed, we can see the ‘bathtub curve’ of failure rates that represents a theoretical period of maximum reliability.

Early life failures

Poor solder joints might work well enough initially to pass on the required signals in initial factory testing, but this is just one example of an assembly process that could fail, leading to an ‘early life failure’ that might take months to occur with normal use.

To reduce the chance of a company selling devices that fail in their early life, manufacturers can simulate the first few months of use of every item off the production line in a few hours with Highly Accelerated Stress Screening (HASS).

HASS is most effective when it applies thermal and vibration stress to assemblies, though the cost of applying vibration profiles during production means that for most consumer products, HASS focusses on the use of rapid thermal cycling…

• Thermal cycling causes components to expand and contract significantly, stressing weak solder joints and components to failure in a few hours instead of months.

• Vibration profiles cause components to flex, again causing stress that can lead to failure in hours rather than months.

End of life / wear-out failures

Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT) allows designers to estimate when correctly-made electronic assemblies will reach the end of their life. Halt is like component time-travel – a ten-year-old phone can be simulated by 10 day’s testing, for instance. If the failure point comes sooner than the predetermined expected device life, designers will update the design or production process to extend the intended lifetime.

HALT is only carried out at the design stage, not on every product made, so the cost of applying vibration profiles is less of an issue.

Vibration testing tends to drive the ageing process most in electronic assemblies, but it’s very product specific and only the component / device design team would be able to understand how to artificially simulate specific failure modes in a representative way – there’s a lot of intellectual property around this.

However… we can draw from the NASA General Environmental Verification Standard (GEVS) and NATO MIL-STD-810 (as well as MIL-HDBK-310) to gain baseline figures for our indicative testing.

HALT typically applies vibration profiles of 14.1 gRMS at low, ambient and high temperature. gRMS is the area under the graph of an Amplitude Spectral Density (ASD) plot and indicates the total energy in the applied profile.

There are some major assumptions being made here. Sinusoidal vibration stimulates specific resonance frequencies in the structure that are design specific, so would require knowledge that only the product designer / manufacturer has.

A typical Halt test profile

To compare the data from our indicative testing, we used an approximated HALT vibration profile based on NATO MIL-STD-810’s 2.1 g2/Hz random vibration limit, which is intended to stop the device from being broken in a non-representative way. The NASA GEVS 20 gRMS random vibration profile is also used, which stops at a frequency of 80 HZ as beyond that electronics don’t tend to break.

Test data analysis: R1250GS Boxer Twin

At idle the vibration transferred to the phone gets highest at around 20 Hz, and the Quad Lock dampener only reduced this peak by 5.5 %. The SP Connect managed just a 4.2 % reduction.

The total area under the graph – which represents the total energy put into the phone – is quite small, but at idle it’s 5 to 10 % MORE when using the anti-vibration mounts than without. So in this scenario, while the peak vibration is reduced a little with the anti-vibration mounts, overall it actually increases.

With the Boxer Twin engine running at 4,000 rpm the peaks move up the frequency range to nearly 50 Hz and are more significant. The Quad Lock dampener reduced the energy transferred to the phone by 5.5%, and the SP Connect managed 4.2%. At these higher revs the total area under the graph is 5-15% lower when using the anti-vibration mounts, so while they have been shown to have some benefit here, there still appears to be a lot of energy being transferred to the phone.

Test data analysis: Kawasaki ZX-6R inline-four

At idle speeds on this 599cc inline-four, adding the QuadLock anti-vibration dampener reduced the vibration energy by 10%, while the SP Connect dampener reduced it by 15%. However, even without the dampeners, the total energy is still very low.

At a steady 5,000 rpm the Quad Lock vibration dampener reduced the energy transmitted to the phone by 45%, and the SP Connect managed 50%. An impressive result, though even without them the data we have indicates that the vibration isn’t likely to cause much of a problem for your phone.

We’ve only tested Quad Lock and SP Connect vibration dampeners, and it’s important to understand that this is a comparative test in which we don’t know the details of each individual phone.

Summary

A HALT vibration and thermal cycle analysis typically takes five days to simulate 20 years of life, so we’re making a large assumption to extrapolate that based on the data we have:

• Five days = 120 hours.

• 20 years / 120 hours is 0.17 years ≈ two months.

If we assume that half of HALT stress comes from temperature and half comes from vibration, based on the data we have, we assume that one hour’s ride = one month’s general use of a phone on the R1250GS’ Boxer Twin engine.

Will mounting your phone to a bike with a ‘lumpy’ engine damage it? We can’t say for sure, but it seems more likely than on one with a smoother-running motor like an inline-four.

If you’d like to chat about this article or anything else biking related, join us and thousands of other riders at the Bennetts BikeSocial Facebook page or at our dedicated forum, bikeclub.bennetts.co.uk.