Creating a low-level smartphone strap-on for your car

We’ve featured the READYACTION mount a number of times here. It’s basically a low-cost system for strapping your smartphone to your bike, yourself, your windscreen or anything else you fancy.

Initially I showed how it could hold onto a digital camera via a chest-harness mount to film some wild kitchen footage. That wasn’t exactly “exciting” though, so I swapped out the mount and put my smartphone into the robust holder to film a summery bike ride.

The guys at READYACTION, who make the various mounts, wanted us to push things a bit further and they showed us how you can surf with one on. Well, try as we might, there’s a distinct lack of surfing facilities around here, so I yesterday I had a bit of a think and came up with this..
Creating a low level smartphone strap on for your car

Y’know when you’re watching Top Gear and see all those miniature cameras stuck to the car they’re showing off? I figured I’d give that a try, but instead of an expensive GoPro camera, I wanted to try my own smartphone instead.
Creating a low level smartphone strap on for your car
Sadly, despite the fact that there’s a suction cup attachment, I didn’t have the guts to rely on it outside of the car. What I wanted to do was place the phone as low as possible, getting some cool low-angle footage, so I used the handlebar mount to attach it to the grill on the front.
Creating a low level smartphone strap on for your car
I had a couple of problems. The first was the fact that the camera button on the side of my phone got pressed when I closed up the mount and tightened the sides. This stopped the video immediately, so I had to slide the phone out of the holder a little so that the camera button was freed up. The second issue was that, when I did a first attempt, the whole thing – as you can probably see – hung a little too low and hit a speed hump. Luckily this resulted in no more than a few deep scratches, but it could’ve pulled the mount off taking possibly the phone and bits of my grill with it.
Creating a low level smartphone strap on for your car

So I moved it up a bit. I also enabled the stabilization system to smooth out the video – everything you see on the resulting video is “as is” without any YouTube tweaks. It does look a lot faster than it actually was, purely because the camera is so low.

The resulting video, filmed completely on a smartphone with the READYACTION harness, is below. I’d like to do more videos like this, and there’s going to be more in the new year. It’d be interesting to combine several smartphone cameras into a smooth online video feature.

What I have learned is that, no matter how good the harness is (and these really are strong and well-made), there’s always the chance that your smartphone will get smashed up doing things like this.