Has anybody here used their old phone that is no longer their day-to-day phone for this? If you enable the hotspot on your primary phone and keep it somewhere safe on your person and then connect the old phone via wifi, that could be a good way to go for some people.
Don't know about the wifi hotspot part, but bar-mounting a GPS mapping device (with no fancy camera to protect) and keeping your good phone safely tucked away in a pocket is a good solution.
Lost telephoto focus on 3 high-end phone cameras before figuring out not to put such cameras on my bars. Now I have a vibration-proof Wahoo ACE GPS computer on the bars to do all the GPS and mapping services I need to see in the saddle.
Granted, the Wahoo's expensive. And an old sacrificial phone running RideWithGPS on the bars would provide most of the info it does now. But its screen is
always readable, whereas my phone screens were often useless in the frequent bright sun here, as you noted. And there are less expensive GPS computers.
Considered the 'old phone on the bars' route, but Verizon gave me $600 for the old phone trade-in. Since I needed a new phone anyway, spending that on the Wahoo made more sense than keeping the old phone.
The Wahoo can do ride recording, but the
Specialized app running in my pocket does a better job. Hence, no need to pair the Wahoo with my ebike (a Specialized Vado SL). Could also have let RideWithGPS do the recording on the phone, but with significantly greater phone battery draw.
