If you're researching motorcycle phone mounts, it won't take long to find stories of phone damage caused by vibration. As smartphones get better, their innards are getting more complex, and as a result, more susceptible to vibration-related damage. Regardless of what type of biking you do, we got some pretty darn good reasons to believe that your phone will be safest in a Peak Design phone mount.
Why? Long story short, because we designed our system from the ground up to protect modern smartphones from the harmful vibrations that some motorcycles exert. We also tested the living daylights out of it with hundreds of phones, riders, bikes, and terrains all over the world.
For a quick peak into the development of our vibration isolation technology, watch this video:
The following Peak Design mounts feature our built-in vibration protection system:
For the longer and more in-depth story, we had Max (the engineer in the film above) write up a longer form article.
Max Maloney Talks Vibration Protection
Hi folks, Max here. I hope you're ready to nerd out about this stuff.
Let's start here: vibrations from motorcycle engines are a very real threat to modern smartphone cameras. These cameras have a few delicate moving parts in their OIS (Optical Image Stabilization) and focusing systems that are quite resistant to damage from normal everyday usage, but they ARE susceptible to internal damage from sustained high-frequency vibration—like what they can experience when rigidly mounted to a motorcycle with a high-revving engine.
That’s why most motorcycle smartphone mounts these days follow one of two approaches: They hold the phone in a loose rubbery grip, or they hold the phone very rigidly but offer to sell you an additional module below the mount that’s designed to soak up these harmful vibrations.
By designing our motorcycle mounting system from the ground up with full knowledge of this potential issue, we’ve integrated an advanced custom designed Vibration Dampener into every motorcycle mount that we make. It’s not an optional add-on that makes you question whether or not you really need it. It’s fully integrated, and as such it’s smaller, svelter, and less wobbly than the competition.
The development of this Vibration Dampener was one of the most thorough technical developments we’ve ever undertaken. Early on in development, we learned how to destroy an iPhone’s camera system repeatably in about 250 miles of high-revving riding on a small, “buzzy” 300cc single-cylinder Honda motorcycle. That motorcycle (owned by our IT guy) became our test mule for over a dozen prototype iterations and countless design tweaks leading up to our final production design. Throughout that development, we cross-checked our work on all the other motorcycles that our employees and close friends ride, as well as in test labs with highly advanced vibration testing machines used for military and aerospace component testing.
We then reached a point where we felt great about the design with zero failures in our test group, but we still wanted to rack up more miles to be absolutely sure that this design was bulletproof. So, we set up the largest Beta Testing program that Peak Design has ever conducted. We organized 79 new testers across 12 different countries with every type of motorcycle imaginable. 6 months later, they had covered 135,000 miles of asphalt, cobblestone, gravel, and dirt. One of our testers even took his mount on 5000 miles in one wild off-road adventure through Patagonia! The results of this Beta Test were phenomenal: We had zero failures from testers using Peak Design phone cases. We had only one camera failure attributed to motorcycle vibration from a tester using a non-PD case and our Universal Adapter. We can confidently say that our motorcycle mounts and cases offer excellent protection against vibration damage.
Nevertheless, if you should experience any vibration-induced damage to your phone camera from your usage on our motorcycle mounts, please reach out to our customer service team (info@peakdesign.com). Myself and the engineering team will likely have a bunch of follow-up questions, and our customer service team will want to help you get back on the road.
Product Warranty Policy
Per our lifetime warranty policy, all Peak Design products are guaranteed for life. If anything we make becomes nonfunctional or defective, we'll repair or replace it for free. We've done it thousands and thousands of times, no questions asked.
That policy does not extend to things we don't make—like cameras, phones, or yourself (please be careful out there).
That said, we are uber-confident in the vibration protection capabilities of our system. If you believe that our motorcycle mounts have caused vibration-related damage to your phone, we want the chance to make things right for you. Please email info@peakdesign.com with a detailed description of the situation. Tell us all the product you were using (phone case, mount, and phone model) as well as your bike make/model/year and engine type. Tell us what kind of riding/terrain you were doing before the damage occurred. We'll do our best to take care of you.