BTR Silicone Handlebar Mobile Phone Mount

It's hard to imagine a much simpler way of fixing your phone to your handlebar than the BTR Silicone Handlebar Mobile Phone Mount, and sometimes simplicity really is best, or at least very good. The BTR Phone Mount Just Works, grabbing handlebar and phone securely and keeping them together until you want to separate them.

• Pros: Very simple, holds phone securely
• Cons: No bells or whistles, straps slightly impede using home button

It feels almost like I'm insulting you to explain how the BTR Phone Mount works, but just in case it's not obvious: this is a single moulded piece of silicone rubber that incorporates a ladder strap and hook to grab your handlebar and thin, very stretchy loops for your phone. Pop phone in loops, wrap strap snugly round your handlebar and you're away.

I used it with an iPhone 7. Larger phones should fit fine, but if you have a smaller phone, you'll want to measure carefully before buying. The BTR Phone Mount might not hold on well to anything significantly smaller than an iPhone 7's 138mm x 67mm. 

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But if your phone does fit, the BTR Phone Mount's grip is tenacious. My partner Caroline is a big fan of having her phone on her handlebar and even managed to crash-test the BTR Phone Mount. It hung on to her phone. (And she was amazingly unharmed despite going over the bar in a spill that could have been very nasty indeed.)

Anything this simple is going to have downsides, of course. For a start there's no weather protection for your phone here, so you'll want to put it in a case of some sort if you're riding in anything but dry, settled weather.

BTR claims the Phone Mount 'lets you see the whole phone screen and home button' and that's not strictly wrong. You can still see the home button, but to press it you might have to push the loop out of the way, a minor annoyance.

It works best with your phone on the handlebar and in portrait orientation. If you want to look at, say, a map in landscape mode them you're going to have to mount it on your stem and put up with whatever angle it ends up at, which might not be ideal for viewing the screen.

The BTR Phone Mount's price of just 12 quid isn't much to securely attach your phone to your handlebar, but there are an awful lot of inexpensive phone mounts out there. This one by TeamObsidian, for example, is incredibly similar to the BTR mount and costs nine quid for the medium-size version and 11 for the large. This £10 Cocoda mount includes a mechanical handlebar clamp and lets you rotate your phone through 180 degrees so you can set it to landscape without taking it off the bar. For £18, this mount by Bovon has a ball-and-socket arrangement so you can change the angle it sits at, and a quick-release so you can easily lift your phone off the bar to take a call.

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More features means more mechanical complexity and therefore more to go wrong. The great appeal of the BTR Phone Mount is there's really almost nothing to go wrong. As I said up top, it Just Works, and that's a compelling reason to like it.

Verdict

Tidy and simple phone holder that does exactly what it says on the tin and no more