Oct. 19, 2025

Exploring BMW Motorrad App: Features for BMW riders

In this episode of the Throttle and Roast podcast, host Niels Meersschaert delves into the BMW Motorrad App tailored for the BMW models with the TFT display. He discusses its innovative features that enhance connectivity between the bike and phone, such as ride tracking, fuel monitoring, and service reminders. Niels highlights the app's user-friendly interface, providing insights into bike status, mileage, and tire pressure. Additionally, he covers the Connectivity Hub and available add-ons that can further improve the riding experience, making it essential for BMW motorcycle enthusiasts.

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00:00 - Introduction

00:56 - Basic bike connection

08:20 - Trip Recording

19:13 - Connected App Navigation

27:13 - Recommended Settings

38:33 - Connected Hub

46:40 - Wrap Up

WEBVTT

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If you're gonna make connections which are innovative, you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

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Welcome to the Throttle and Roast podcast. I'm your host, Niels Meersschaert. I've had my BMW F900GS for a few months now, and it's time to dive deep into the BMW Connected App features that work with it and other BMW models. I'll cover the basic features of Bike Connection that it provides, including phone and media, and I'll walk you through the ride tracking and Connected App navigation. I'll also cover some setting options and what I've found are my recommendations. Finally, I'll look at the Connectivity Hub as BMW offers a few other add-ons to enhance your experience even further.

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So let's get started with the basics. The fundamental capability of the BMW Connected App is that it interfaces from your phone to your bike. this is a little bit of a unique for pretty much most bikes that have ever existed. Most bikes were sort of independent, but now as a lot of the electronics have been adding into some of the bikes, you have more capabilities for a more fully unified capability. And BMW has really accentuated this and they began having this capability around with the 2014 model line with some of the bikes that included the TFT. And this started typically with the BMWs model line, where they had a six and a half inch TFT. And that's the same display that I have on my F900GS. So it's a really nice sharp color display. But because of the more advanced electronics that are part of these bikes today, bringing and connecting your phone to your bike actually has a couple of other benefits.

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And I want to cover a few of those of what's possible. So I'm going to look at this from two perspectives. Number one is I'm going to look at what you can do on the app. and the second is going to be what you can do on the bike because of that connection to your phone. So let's start with the app. Now, what's really neat with the app is when you first launch it, it's going to launch and show you the model of your bike, assuming you've already connected it to your bike in the past. And if you have more than one BMW model, which is capable to be connected, you'll be able to select which model you wanted to look at at any given point.

00:02:35.984 --> 00:03:13.872
But what's really interesting about this is it will display the date when your bike was last connected to your phone. And typically, as soon as you turn the bike on, it's going to be able to connect and bind with your phone over Bluetooth. And this is where the bike will show you an estimate of your remaining fuel as a percentage and then also what your estimated range is. So if you've ever gone out for a ride, maybe you were getting home and you were just, I just want to get home. I didn't even want to think about refueling before I get home. I have a bit of a habit where I tend to refuel the bike just when I'm getting home.

00:03:13.913 --> 00:04:18.389
This way, it's always full. This is really easy. If I can look on my phone, I can see exactly how much remaining range I have on the bike so that if I'm going to go and do a trip, I'm going to be like, oh, first thing I got to do is go and get fuel And it's just nice to have that as a reference point that I can very easily see where I am. This is also helpful if you're out on a trip and maybe you pulled over and then you having lunch, whatever you can look at this, you can see what your next destination is and say, oh, actually, I've got to stop and get fuel before or sooner along this trip. So it's nice to have that visibility. Now, of course, because it knows about what your mileage is on the bike, it can also indicate when your next service is due. Now, most BMWs tend to have service is either on a mileage basis or on a time basis. And of course, most BMWs over the what, 20 years at this point have had some sort of electronic measurement and timing in the bike itself of showing when your last service was reset. And then it can show you an indication effectively of when your next service is due.

00:04:18.709 --> 00:04:43.050
Well, now I can see that right on my phone and I know exactly when that next service is due and it'll display it both from a time perspective, as well as the miles remaining until I need that service. And if I click on my bike up at the top of the screen, I can get in and see even a few other details of the bike so I can see what the current odometer is, I can see what the current trip miles are.

00:04:38.089 --> 00:05:02.050
And if your bike has a tire pressure monitoring, you can see the tire pressure both front and rear. This is really convenient as we're now getting into the colder weather months. If you are parking your bike in a garage, the pressure is going to change as the temperature changes, you will be able to see,"Oh, do I need to refill the bike?" without having to get out a pressure gauge and check on it.

00:05:01.759 --> 00:05:16.230
my F900GS does not have the tire pressure monitoring built into it, so I don't have that. But it is a feature that the app does make available. And then the last one is what your total ride time is. This is how long you've actually been riding the bike.

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So you have not just an indication of how many miles, but how long in duration you've been riding. So these are kind of cool that you can just have some very high level metrics about your motorcycle that you can see on your phone at any time. You don't even have to be physically close to your bike because it's synced and held that information on your phone.

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So it's always available to you to be able to view.

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You know, I'd just switch on to the bike and say, well, what does the bike gain from connecting the app to it? one of the more useful capabilities that I'd say is as you're riding along on your bike, because of that TFT display, it's going to show you on the natural sort of standard display. It's going to show you typically an RPM gauge, and it'll show you a speed usually displayed digitally.

00:06:05.711 --> 00:06:33.045
well, because your phone is connected to the bike and the phone, of course, has understanding of where it physically is in space because it typically has a going to show you where it's expected. This will allow your phone to communicate what the current speed limit information is for the road that you're riding along, and therefore, you can actually see that indicated on your TFT so you know, hey, here's what my current speed is, here's the current speed limit.

00:06:29.045 --> 00:06:39.730
It's just a nice extra reference in case you missed some of the speed limit signs as you were riding along and just focusing on the road. I will caveat this.

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It does not necessarily work on every single road. It's all up to the mapping provider as to whether they have that information. But in a lot of roads that at least I've tested with, it does have that. And so it's a nice extra reference point to know where you are. Now, the one that, of course, I think most people think of, well, what do I get for connecting my phone?

00:07:00.942 --> 00:07:08.911
Well, the big thing is you get phone connectivity such that you can make and receive phone calls.

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You manage these with the wonder wheel, that sort of rotating wheel on the left hand side of the bike on the left handlebar.

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And you can also control your media playback. So you can select and start like a podcast or music, whatever you'd like to do directly from the TFT display.

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Now, in order for that to really work, because, of course, that's going to have audio, you also have to have paired a Bluetooth headset to the bike. this sort of works in a kind of an intermediary sense you might have had in the past where you would have connected your phone directly to your headset. Well, in this case, you're connecting the phone to the bike and your headset to the bike. And the bike becomes the central point into which all communication goes. So you're able to send your phone information over, you're able to see contacts, you're able to make and receive the phone calls. And this will, of course, connect to the Bluetooth headset that you've already bound to the bike and listening to music, which I really enjoy doing when I'm on the bike. But now I can actually adjust it directly on the bike with that wonder wheel. It does make it a lot more convenient.

00:08:12.399 --> 00:09:42.845
So that's the most basic connectivity that you get from connecting your phone to the bike now because you now have that connection intrinsically done there's a couple of other really cool things that you get as a benefit of this beyond those sort of fundamentals that I think most people think of. And the first one is if you've ever used an app like Revver to record your rides before you know that you have to remember to click record at the start of your ride. And I've personally forgotten to do that many, many, many, many times. And I remember it maybe I'm a mile two miles down the road and I remember and I pull over to start it or I realized that I didn't start it at the end of my ride. And this can be a little frustrating if you want to have a memory of what your trip has been. And there's other apps, as many of the listeners will know, I'm a big fan of Beeline as a GPS unit and that also has a record function. So you can record your ride and then your Beeline will just provide sort of a current speed indicator, as it's recording the ride. But you have to remember to click record for that to happen. The cool thing about the BMW connected app is that as soon as you riding the bike, as soon as you turn it on, it's going to begin to record those rides. and the ride's actually being recorded on your phone.

00:09:37.924 --> 00:10:43.258
But because it's getting additional data from your bike, you get more insights than you would get from something like a Rever. So when you look at, after you've completed one of your trips, you can actually see these trips will be listed in the app. And now you can click on any one of the trips. You'll be able to see a map of the route that you did. You'll be able to see which motorcycle was used. If you have more than one BMW motorcycle, of course, able to be used with the BMW connected app, it would be able to pick which one you use. You can see when you started the ride, you can see your total distance, you can see your riding time, what was your average speed and the max and min outside temperatures, as well as the max and minimum altitude of that ride. So this is pretty similar to what I would say you would get with something like a Rever. Beeline has many of these. They don't have the temperature or the altitude features most of the time. But one thing that's really unique that comes in with the BMW connected app is you get some performance measurements.

00:10:40.957 --> 00:11:14.139
Now these are going to vary based upon your specific bike, but at least on my F900GS I get max engine RPM, I get max lean angle left and right, I get max acceleration and max deceleration and both of those displayed in G's. So this is kind of cool, because now you can really start to get some other insights into how your ride has been going. And in fact, you can see these on a timeline of your ride, choose up to two different data pieces to plot.

00:11:14.139 --> 00:12:32.288
So you can choose from your throttle grip position as a percentage of how much you've turned the throttle. You can see the engine RPM, you can see speed if you've enabled recording it, and you can see the altitude. And then what you can do is you play your route and what will happen is that the play indicator will move along this graph that's showing you each of those performance metrics you've displayed. And you'll see your arrow moving along your route to show you where your physical position was on the ride. So you can really play back your ride and get a lot of really interesting insights into this. The other thing you can do is you can display any assistive systems that you have on your bike on the map. So things like ABS or traction control. And what's interesting, at least on my bike, I, you know, of course, mine is the F900GS. It came with the Enduro and off-road package. So I have full knobby tires on there, which if you're riding on pavement is not going to give you the most amount of grip. So what I've found, at least in my riding, and maybe I'm a little too aggressive when I'm riding, but I tend to see a lot of those ABS and traction control indicators displayed on my map because apparently I'm hitting a little aggressive onto my braking or onto my acceleration.

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Bottom line is that this is an insane amount of data to play with, and something not possible on an app like Rever or Beeline that doesn't have access to the bike's onboard sensors. It can be a lot of fun to geek out on.

00:12:44.446 --> 00:14:52.100
The only thing I would say is how often are you really gonna do this? really reviewing it for some of these performance metrics. I mean, maybe if you're going to the track, it's gonna be useful because you could play back your ride on the track and say, "Hey, where exactly on the track was I hitting into the throttle?" You can then maybe use that to influence your next, session out on the track to say,"Hey, what would you do differently?" But I think if you're just doing normal rides, this might not be as much of an interesting thing. The other tab that is in the same sort ride viewing stage is the photo tab, and this is where you can add photos to your trip. Now, you can also have these automatically added to your trip, and you will get into that when we talk about the settings. But essentially, if you have attached a photo to the trip, and that photo has embedded location on it, and if you take a picture with your phone, most phones, certainly all of the iOS devices do this, but many of the Android devices do as well, it will embed the location information into the image. And this can be pulled out, and now on your route, there'll be an icon for each place where you have one of those photos, and you can see physically where you took the photo and see that, and click on it, and then you'll be able to see the photo be able to pop up. So it's kind of cool to be able to have a visual history that is integrated so seamlessly with your trip. So overall, one of the really nice things about this is you have a ton of information about the trips that you've taken on the bike. And most important to me, and this is the feature that I think is really the most critical for it, I don't have to remember to hit record. It's something that has been so frustrating to me over the years of I've done a really amazing ride, and then I realize after the fact that I forgot to hit record on Rever. it is such a game changer to me of just simplifying this aspect of being able to capture your rides.

00:14:48.857 --> 00:15:00.830
That's really helpful. Some listeners may be out there saying, "Well, why do I care about recording my rides at all?" And if you've not been a long-time user of Rever, as I have, this may not matter to you.

00:15:00.909 --> 00:15:03.549
But here's the reason why I think it's really valuable.

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First off, if you've done a ride that day, and maybe you had some really amazing roads that you experienced, well, the beauty is now you can go back and you can actually see those roads and you can then pick them out and then sort of capture them as, "Here's a segment of a ride that I would like to do again. Here's that segment of road that I really enjoyed." And on the Beeline, I do this all the time where you can do a road rating. You can thumb up or thumb down a particular road. And I do the same thing. I'll look through Beeline Journeys and see all of the places that I've mapped as being positive or negative. the future, I can then pick the roads that I've already said I really enjoy. So it's nice to have that ability to capture it.

00:15:48.245 --> 00:16:51.370
and what's cool is some of the capabilities that having that recording allows you to do, which we're going to talk about right now. so one of the things you can do is when you're in this trip view, you can edit or share this trip. So each trip by default uses the destination if you were using navigation. So if you were navigating to let's say your local dealer, whatever destination name you had in for that would be displayed as the name of that trip. Otherwise it's going to be simply the date and the time that the trip occurred. But you can then go in and you can edit this name to give it a little bit more meaningful. Maybe you didn't have a destination, but now you were going to an amazing cafe that you were stopping at and you wanted to record and edit that into your trip log. Well, you can go and edit that very easily. And if the trip had attached photos, when you share this trip, these photos are available for you to use as a background. And this is a cool little feature where it will give you an overlay of your max acceleration, your max deceleration, any lean angles.

00:16:51.370 --> 00:17:02.591
And you can overlay these over an image from your trip and share that. You could share it as a text message, email, social media, whatever you'd like to do.

00:16:59.291 --> 00:18:16.767
Pretty much any app that you would normally be able to share an image with, you can now export from the app. And if you didn't have any photos on the trip, there are some default images that you can use. So if you did want to share some of your metrics, maybe you got a really great lean angle on this particular ride and you wanted to celebrate that. This is something that you can now do with that sharing. last one that I want to touch on is that there's two additional options that you can use for this sort of sharing. And this becomes part of the other reason why I alluded to of having that recording of the ride can be helpful. Maybe you did this ride and you thought it was amazing, or maybe you were actually doing a ride that was being led by someone else and you loved the ride and you'd love to be able to ride it again. Well, guess what? Because you have that route recorded, you can actually just click ride again. And now this will open up into the navigation section and navigate you along that route that you've taken. So you can redo a ride that you really enjoyed in the past. And maybe you created this ride and wanted to share it with some friends. Well, you can export this ride as a GPX and now they can use it onto any sort of GPS that they may have.

00:18:13.007 --> 00:19:13.209
It doesn't even have to be a BMW connected app. They could use it on Rever. They could use it on a Garmin. They could use it on a TomTom. Any sort of GPS that will import a GPX file, related to that trip recording feature is a trip import screen. And here, if you have a GPX file from another tool, maybe it was from another rider who had recorded something on their connected app, and you want to import that ride, you can actually import that directly into the app. And these will now be displayed in your app as imported trips. And of course, just like you could with the trips that you've recorded yourself, you can choose to ride that trip. So this makes it really easy to plan a ride out still using a tool like Rever, which I still think is one of the best ride planning tools out there. But I can plan the ride, I can export it as GPX, I can then import it into my BMW connected app. And now it is available for me to use to navigate and run that.

00:19:13.892 --> 00:20:03.221
So let's get into what is probably the coolest capability of this app, and how it connects into your bike, which is the connected app navigation. BMW has had TFTs on their bikes, as I said, they started with that in 2014. And they've continued to expand the model range into which these displays are available. So they're on many, many of the bikes today, the exception where they would not have them would be some of the more heritage inspired bikes. So my r18 classic, for example, is still a relatively new model at 2021. But it does not have that TFT display, it just it wouldn't go aesthetically with that design. As well as the R9T line doesn't have that TFT display, they have more of this traditional analog style gauges.

00:20:03.263 --> 00:21:53.634
But many of the other bikes have been adding in these TFTs. And most of the bikes will this six and a half inch display that's just like what I have on my F900GS. But there's a couple of models where they have a new 10 and a quarter inch display. And this would include things like the R18 bagger, the R18 transcontinental, and the new also has this sort of widescreen display. The 6 1/2 inch being sort of the basic nuts and bolts of it still allows you to get a lot of information onto there, but having a wider display gives you a little bit more screen real estate. And this is where the app takes advantage of You can actually navigation on the dashboard of your bike using this app. And this is really, really cool. if you have the 6 1/2 inch, it will kind of work functionally almost like the Beeline Moto does. You'll have an arrow that's going to indicate hey, you have to make a turn in so much distance. And it will give you a little bit of indications more so than you get with a Beeline. Like maybe it'll give a indicator of which lane you'd need to be in if you're on a divided highway. But if you have the 10 1/4 inch display, you'll also have a moving map component. And this is really cool because now you actually have the advantage of a dedicated map based GPS unit like you'd get with a Garmin Zumo. or a TomTom that you would have as a dedicated unit, you can get that on the 10 1/4 inch display. The best way to think of this is just like the Beeline Moto, your bikes TFT is a remote screen for the app running on your phone. All of the smarts, all the intelligence of how the navigation is occurring is happening actually on your phone.

00:21:49.624 --> 00:22:49.426
the consequence of that is that in many times if you wanted to say, hey, I want to go on a trip and I'd like to get to this place. You're going to have to either pick that location on your phone before you begin the trip or if you're picking a destination in the middle of the trip, you're gonna have to pull over, take out your phone, and select that destination. And the main reason for this is that because you don't have a full touch interface on the bike's TFT, you do have that wonder wheel, that sort of, that whiz wheel. But it can't do a lot of like big data entry to sort of search for a location that you'd want to get to. So you're probably going to have to do a lot of the destination inputting on your phone. this is not an unusual situation for most devices, even my Garmin GPS. I can enter it, but really it's a good idea. If you're going to be sitting there and typing in stuff, you probably want to pull over. Anyway, just rather than doing it while you're riding.

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But you do have some destinations that can be chosen on the bike with that wonder wheel multi And the first one is spending a bit of time with the app to load in some of your frequent destinations like home or work or your dealer can make a lot of sense. And any of these favorites now can be selected within the TFT display and quickly then chosen to navigate to. So you don't have to pull I want to get home now quickly pop it in into the bikes TFT and within a few seconds, you've got it already navigating you your destination. This works great for a lot of your favorites. the other one that it allows you to select from is any recent destinations. So even if you have a destination that you haven't saved as a favorite, you can pick places that you've navigated to recently from a quick list. And this can be convenient as well, reducing how often you really need to pull over and use your phone to find that place. And this last one is really the one that I think becomes the beneficial for day to day usage. And these are POIs or points of interest using the wonder wheel multi controller.

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You can pick a point of this could be like a fuel refilling station. It could be restaurants.

00:24:02.224 --> 00:24:23.005
There's a bunch of other categories that you can choose from. So if you're running low on fuel, you can just look for the closest filling station in the bike can now navigate you there. So really convenient to be able to do this directly on the bike. And there are some GPS units like the Garmin that have allowed you to search for fuel.

00:24:19.045 --> 00:24:26.934
But again, this is now built into the bike. I don't need to go and buy a dedicated GPS unit.

00:24:27.305 --> 00:24:45.760
It's already there and provides the convenience directly from my phone. Now when you select a destination, and you want to follow the route to get there, what's going to happen is that your bike is going to use your default routing type as defined in the settings on your phone.

00:24:42.151 --> 00:24:57.786
And I'll cover settings and details a little bit later. But you can also change the route from your default for this specific trip. So there is some and it can all be done from the Wonder Wheel multi-controller.

00:24:57.786 --> 00:25:14.932
So if you want to do just quick, fast A/B you can do that. If you want to do a nice winding road, you can do that. So you can change it up to whatever is your intention in the Now, remember those trips that we had imported?

00:25:10.729 --> 00:25:55.051
Well, you can follow these routes as well. And so if you spent countless hours just meticulously planning an epic ride, you can follow that route directly on the bike screen. So really convenient just to take advantage of this and not have to add anything extra to your bike. You've got all of the navigation just built directly into the bike. And if it's one of those new ten and a quarter inch displays, you actually get a full map as well. Just really, really nice this is something that's built into the bike already. So I'm very impressed with it. Now, there's a few caveats that I'm going to mention about the way that this practically works on the bike.

00:25:52.471 --> 00:26:24.843
And the first one has to do with your favorites. While there isn't a practical limit on how many favorites you can save, the more you have, the more scrolling you need to get to the one that you're trying to actually choose from. probably best to kind of keep it more reasonable and not have, you know, hundreds and hundreds of favorites, because you're just not practically going to be able to select and find those. I would really recommend keeping it to less than 10.

00:26:21.192 --> 00:26:45.282
Realistically, those are your favorites. Anything else you would search for when you really want to do it, because they're not really something you're doing with any frequency. So you want to try to make it something that's practical. The other thing is that because of the limited screen real estate that you have, the length of the name will be important and it's going to truncate the tail end of it.

00:26:45.282 --> 00:27:12.968
So you're going to want to make sure that anything that is significant is simple names like home, work, BMW dealer, those work really well. But longer names like the Toymakers Cafe in Falls Village, Connecticut will be cut off and so you might want to just try using Toymakers instead as a way to capture that favorite name and still have it easily visible and selectable within your list.

00:27:13.477 --> 00:27:44.247
let's talk a little bit about the settings part of the app. This allows you to configure a ton of information about the app and how it works with phone with your And I really I'm not going to go through every single one of these, but I'm going to go through the ones that I think are the most critically important for you. So I mentioned before that route type that you can have as your default. Well, there's actually four of these you can choose from fast, short, efficient and winding. So what does that mean?

00:27:44.247 --> 00:28:21.980
Well, fast think of this as if you ever used Google Maps before, it'll be the shortest time and probably will route you on highways. So if you just want to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, fast is a perfectly good option. And there's a lot of riders who oftentimes just use Google Maps to plan a ride and it will get them where they want to go, but it may not be the most fun roads to ride along. There's a couple of other options that you can choose from. So one is short and this will be the shortest distance, but it may ignore highways. Now, sometimes highways actually have a bypass.

00:28:21.980 --> 00:28:54.363
So they'll actually be faster speed wise, but longer distance wise. So short will really focus on the shortest distance, not the shortest time. Another one is efficient. And this will attempt to create a route that will be the most fuel or battery efficient. If you have one of the electric scooters, for example, and it'll consider things like elevation changes, speed changes, or stop and go traffic. And if you're running low on fuel, this could be a good option to extend your range.

00:28:54.363 --> 00:29:42.921
So maybe if you're looking for that fuel station, maybe you pick the efficient route to get there just to kind of give you as much longevity as you possibly can. take it with a balancing act though, because sometimes an efficient route isn't the fastest or the shortest. you want to maybe think about how to use this intelligently, Now, the one that I personally find as my favorite is the winding. And I've talked about Rever before. We have a couple of blog articles on the website as well. Rever is quite frankly, it's my favorite app for planning a ride. And it has this great feature called twisty roads and this twisty roads lets you find the fun roads that you actually want to take your bike on these nice, tight corners, really just a fun road to get on.

00:29:39.601 --> 00:29:42.921
And it's a great way to do this.

00:29:43.000 --> 00:29:46.921
Now there's similar capabilities.

00:29:43.000 --> 00:29:56.911
For example, on the Beeline, you can do a fun route, which is going to again, prioritize those roads that had a higher road rating and the ones that are tend to be a little bit more twisty. So that works well.

00:29:57.340 --> 00:30:14.836
Garmin of course has the adventurous routing, which is a very option of that. You can really have that winding road that you want to follow now in the BMW app. You can actually select a slider to indicate how much of a winding road you want.

00:30:15.650 --> 00:30:19.579
And this works perfectly well.

00:30:15.650 --> 00:30:26.579
It will, as you move more towards the one side into the more winding section, it will really try to get you on as many, many winding roads as possible.

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I have found some awkward routing that can happen from this. So what I've seen, for example, is let's say that the main road has a couple of streets that divide off of it and then reconnect with it. I had this happen on, for example, route 22 here in New York. And there's a few sections of where there's the old route 22 that kind of divides off to the side.

00:30:51.201 --> 00:31:21.381
passes by a couple of old houses, but the main route has sort of straightened it and bypassed that section. But what will happen is if you have it on the windy, it'll try to get you onto those kind of winding, slower sections of the old route 22, and then reconnect you back onto the main route 22. And while, yes, it is more windy, it's not necessarily more fun. In some cases, I've even had it do this for like two tenths of a mile diversion onto this little road.

00:31:17.151 --> 00:31:49.696
So having it way too much on the winding side, I've found doesn't work well. So I found usually between the midway point and maybe about three quarters, somewhere in that range is going to work well. Now, another option that you have in the phone app is avoidances. And most any sort of navigation app or device has this concept of avoidances. So this might be avoid highways or avoid tolls or dirt roads or ferries or tunnels.

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And this app is really not much different. The only thing is you have to be careful with these avoidances because this is actually set at a global level.

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So if you were to, for example, say, I want to avoid highways all the time, but then you select the fast in the bike, when you want to get somewhere very quickly, it will still avoid highways. as I'm using this on my GS, I actually don't mind having dirt roads. In fact, I welcome dirt roads. So I don't have that disabled on mine. And what I would probably say is that for most riders, don't really turn off most of the avoidances other than maybe the dirt roads if you're on, let's say, a road bike. But all the other ones like tunnels and ferries and highways, maybe ferries you might turn off. But the other ones, I would say just leave them enabled and then use your route type really is the the key differentiator because you can select directly on the bikes TFT of what your route for the specific ride would be. And it just gives you a little bit more flexibility and one of the other settings that you'll probably want to take a look at is the trip settings. If you remember, we talked about how you can record any of the trips that you do on the bike. this area of the app allows you to define how it records those rides or even if it does. So you can disable ride recording entirely. You can enable any sort of speed recording on your rides and the speed recording.

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Remember, this is for recording it at every single moment along the ride. It will be able to calculate your average speed just looking at what the distance was that was traveled and the duration. But speed recording is really telling you like at this specific point, this was the speed you were doing. So if you wanted to play it back with that timeline view or the dashboard view, you could see the speed indicated there.

00:33:40.522 --> 00:34:43.257
Personally, what I do is I have recording enabled, but without the speed. And mostly because I get that average speed. I don't need to know my speed at every moment. I'm not going to geek out on it all that much. I do have photos embedded automatically. I really like having this because then any pictures that I've just pulled over to the side of the road and taken are automatically integrated into that trip after the fact. And then there's ways that you can parameterize how a trip is. Sort of defined is whether it records or not. You can set the minimum distance for the trip. You can set the minimum time. And what I do is I set the minimum distance for the trip to the lowest possible value. I don't care about saying, Hey, it has to be 10 miles or 15 miles. I just set it to whatever the minimum is, which I think is one mile. But then what I do is I set the minimum time to 15 minutes. And the reason why I found that this is convenient is if I have to run out to the local gas station to fill up, Well, I can do that, but I don't want to have that recorded as a trip. That's not really a trip.

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or if I had to do a quick errand into town, or maybe I just was moving the bike in and out of the garage and I started the bike up. I don't want it to really record just those little snippets. They're not really helpful as a trip. So this minimum time set to 15 minutes really works for me, but you can adjust it to your own taste is what makes sense. The more critical one to me is actually the max break time per ride. Now, if you think of it, when you start the bike and you begin your ride, well, you may have to stop in the middle. Maybe you stop for fuel and you're going to turn the ignition off. This is going to now count as you've stopped the bike, you're taking a break. Well, what you can do is you can set a maximum break time for that ride before it splits this ride into multiple trips. this could be for a fuel stop, it could be for food, even a rest stop. And if you don't want this ride to be split up into multiple trips each time that you do that, ensuring that your max break time is high enough will avoid splitting your ride. Now, personally, I use this as one hour. And the reason is that I find that on most trips, when I stopped for a meal in the middle of a ride, it's usually less than an hour. I'm stopping, maybe I'm getting something very quick and then I'm going to be on my way and maybe it's half an hour or something like that. I've finished the food and now I'm able to get back on the road. I still want to have that counting as one big trip because place where I stopped for food was really kind of incidental to the trip rather than being the destination of the And for me, when the meal is more the destination, I'll probably be there a little bit longer. Maybe I'm going with a group of friends and we may hang out at the place for more than an hour.

00:36:22.335 --> 00:36:47.463
And usually then that was the destination. And now I want to want to have recorded is what was my outbound trip and then what was my return trip as two separate trips. So I found an hour works for me, but you may choose to make it longer, shorter, whatever But I'd say this is the key thing that I would really focus on of tuning for how you define your rides.

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Now, there's one last settings area that I want to highlight.

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this is really about the map download. With your phone, it's kind of better to download the maps in advance so that you're not just getting into an area.

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Now, you no longer have any mapping and you want people to see any points of interest or any routing that you would need to do, especially if you get into an area without cell service. Now the way it's broken out in the app is most areas are broken into states here in the US. And in a lot of the rest of the world, certainly in Europe, it tends to be broken into countries, although Germany does have sections of country. But in most of them, European countries tend to be about the same size as many US states. Now, the app is smart enough. If you plan a ride and you're going maybe across multiple states, it will actually automatically begin to download all of the states that are between where you are, and where you're going to, just to make sure that it has every bit of data it needs for that entire trip. But to make it convenient for me, I tend to keep my own state and several surrounding states that aren't that far away I'm using about 1.6 gigabytes of data for five states. this works for me because where I am in New York, I'm of course, 10 minutes and I can be in Connecticut. I could go for half an hour and I could be in New Jersey. just two states within less than an hour of one another. And Massachusetts is only a couple of hours away. Pennsylvania's actually maybe about an hour away because it's not that far from New Jersey. So I can hit into any one of these other states relatively quickly. So I tend me, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, those are the five states that I Now, the last thing I wanted to talk was the connected hub. If you look on the main screen of the BMW connected app, you'll see down towards the bottom, this connected hub. And the reason why BMW has used the branding connected is not just for saying, Hey, here's this app and your bike's TFT. There's a lot of other devices that you can connect together that add additional capabilities. Now, I don't personally own any of these, but I did want to share a general overview of each of them to see maybe if they're right for you. So the first one I'll talk about is the Connected Ride Com U1. This is essentially a BMW branded Bluetooth headset.

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Now, I personally have a Cardo on my dual sport while my modular has a And any Bluetooth headset generally will connect and work with the bike. So there isn't a requirement to buy the BMW specific one. But if you're in a dealership, it's your first time buying a bike like this, that you actually want a headset, getting it directly from the dealer could be a convenience.

00:39:34.494 --> 00:40:52.820
So I'd say that's really where this comes in, is that they now have something they can offer directly at the dealership to bind with your bike. Speaker The next one is something called the Connected Ride Cradle. Now, you can mount your phone in the nav prep with this cradle. And now you can see those moving maps displayed on the app of your phone while you ride. Now, some may like this because this does provide more detail than just the arrows, specifically if you have the six and a half inch display. So most of the time, the bikes that have the nav prep where you can add an additional nav unit onto them are those bikes with the six and a half inch display. So BMW's GS line is pretty common for having these. this makes it really easy where it can lock directly into that cradle and you can mount your phone. Now, personally, I'm not a fan of this. And it doesn't mean that I don't like that the capability of being able to see the maps. That's not my issue, but more of, I feel that too many motorcyclists gotten into bad habit of using their phone mounted on the for navigation and Rever does bunch of other apps, people look at it as a convenience of, Oh, I don't need to get a dedicated device for navigating on bike. And it's true functionally. That is true.

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But here's the phones are not designed to be sitting on a motorcycle handlebar for a couple of reasons. Number one is they're not going to work with the vibration. I've actually had this happen in the past where I destroyed the camera on my phone because the vibration on that phone was so excessive. It literally destroyed the cameras.

00:41:15.396 --> 00:41:35.780
the other thing that I've had happen with it is they're sitting out there and all of the wind is hitting and it's destroyed the microphone and the speakers. So the phone is not really meant to be sitting out on the handlebar of your bike.

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Dedicated GPS units are made for that situation, and they may have more hardened capabilities.

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Now, there are hardened smartphones you can get certainly on the Android platform, for example, but for most people their normal phone isn't really meant to be sitting out there on the bike. I'll actually throw a link in the show notes for an article that I wrote about why this can be problematic for your phone, but this would be the thing that I'd say is I'm not a big fan of this Connected Ride as a concept.

00:42:03.469 --> 00:45:26.932
This is why I actually like the BMW Connected app working on my TFT is that my phone can be on my person, it can be hidden away, it's gonna be away from all that vibration, it's gonna be away from all that wind and protected while I can still get the value of the information on that display. But if you really want to have a moving map and you have one of the six and a half inch bikes, remember that 10 end corner will be able to display the map information on it, but if you wanted to do this, this is kind of another option and it's called the Connected Ride Navigator. This is very similar to the old BMW Navigator units that were actually made by Garmin. They were fundamentally a Garmin Zumo internal, but they just had the same form format that BMW used for many years, so that it could mount directly into this cradle. And this go directly into the Nav Prep on any of the bikes, like the F900GS, the R1300GS, the R1250, etc. All of those bikes had this Now, personally, I use a Garmin Zumo XT on my F900GS and the reason is that my bike, because it was meant as an off-road package, actually didn't even come with the Nav Prep. But I already had the Zumo. It's great for being using off-road. I have topographical maps on it so I can see all of the really cool stuff as riding in off-road terrain. So I do like that capability. But if you already have a Zumo or a TomTom, the Connected Ride Navigator could be a very useful option to let you see that moving map display on there. It is an additional device. They're $800 or $900, so they're not super cheap. Now, if you're getting your first GS and you don't already have that GPS, this can be useful. But, you still may want to consider getting a more dedicated unit like the Garmin Zumo, and I'll actually have a in the show notes for our review of the Garmin Zumo. The main reason is the Garmin Zumo can be used on any motorcycle. I can mount it onto any of these bikes, whereas the BMW Connected Ride Navigator, I can only use on that BMW Connected. The advantage, and this is where I'd say you may consider it over, let's say, a Garmin Zumo, I can control it and manipulate it with that Wonder Wheel. model. So the integration is its real value point, rather than being its own specific device. I think there's a trade-off of how well integrated you want, versus how expandable you can have it for other bikes, and especially if you don't only have BMWs, this may be too limiting. And I think the app, the beauty of it is that you get all, a lot of the bang for buck with the app without having to have a dedicated device, so this is where I think the trade-off comes for me personally, is I would say if you're going to get a dedicated mapping unit, I would go for more of a versus the Connected Ride Navigator, Now, the Connected Hub device that BMW has is perhaps the most unique option for the connectivity hub, and these are the Connected Ride Smart Glasses, and what these glasses do is they project a heads-up display, showing some key data points from your bike and navigation.

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So they can include your current speed, they can show the speed limit, they can show navigation prompts, just like the arrows that you have on that smaller six and a half inch TFT. And this is absolutely more of a nice to have rather than a need to have. I like that it can keep your eyes up and on the road, but a quick glance down to check your speedometer or the nav directions isn't that big a deal.

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That's how we've been doing and riding bikes for many, many years at this point. for $700, whether this added benefit of that little heads-up display is worth it to you, I don't know.

00:46:03.503 --> 00:46:39.157
You have glasses that work only with the BMW bikes. And you need to remember to charge them. It seems like cool, but very pricey and limited utility. Now if you're all in on BMW motorcycles and all of your bikes are connected of bikes, maybe you'd see some value in it. But my F900GS is the only bike I have which would even be possible of using this. And $700 for a pair of glasses that I have to remember to charge all the time doesn't seem worth it to me.

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Your choice might be a little different.

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So let's wrap up. We covered some of the basic app and bike connection features that the BMW connected app provides for motorcycle. And then we looked at trip recording and importing and the amazing amount of detail that you can review of your past trips using the BMW connected app. Next, I looked deep into the navigation features provided by your phone, but displayed on your bikes TFT and also covered some key settings that can make your experience a little bit easier And last I looked at how the connected app and your bikes TFT are simply two parts of a hub of connectivity that BMW provides.

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And I walked through an overview of each of these accessories and how they may work for you. So my question for you is, do you use the connected app for your BMW?

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Or does knowing about the features make you more or less likely to buy a BMW for your next bike? Share your thoughts to the text show link and then the show notes or leave a voicemail at throttle on roast dot com slash voicemail. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you next week.