Thanks for tuning in this is The Sweet
Cyclists today Today we are going to look at the
Coros SafeSound Urban helmet. Here we
have the Coros SafeSound Urban helmet,
big thanks to Coros for providing the
helmet. We are very excited to review it, as
it's part of the current trend
of smart helmets that provide audio,
tail lights as well as SOS
features for safety. While we
remove the helmet from the packaging, lets take a look
at the specs. You'll see that:
this is a $200 helmet, this is the urban
style helmet and they also have a road
one and a mountain bike versions. With the
urban style you get this smooth
exterior design with 10 air vents and this
hat bill on the front of the helmet
to block out the sun. It has up
to 10 hours of battery life with a built
in 500 mAh battery. It has Bluetooth
connectivity to communicate between the
helmet and your smartphone as well as a
Coros app.
Finally it has a ear opening sound
system (EOSS), which definitely sounds like a
marketing term someone's invented what
this means is it has a directional
speaker, you can see here instead of
having the headphones directly go near
the ear which is definitely not a safe
thing to do and instead of using the
bone conductivity they've done in the
past, the SafeSound has a channel built
into the speaker that directs the sound
directly in your ear canal. This results
in a more ambient style sound
system to ensure you have still have spatial
awareness when you're riding. It also has
a built in tail light on the back which
is another great feature. Let's go ahead
and take it completely out of the
packaging now. Here's the helmet and you
also get a little box with some additional parts.
Taking a quick look at the helmet you have
a USB port on back, and the primary on/off button.
We have a tag on the straps which
indicates that it has a scent protection
built-in. Let's go ahead and open the
little box here and see what goodies we
have. We have our user manual, a
cable which is a micro USB port
to USB style connector for charging
the helmet. You also have this remote
which is another great feature.
It's a multifunction remote that
actually has backlight built-in, you
can see when you turn it on when you
press the center button.
You also have volume control, and the ability to
fast-forward played soundtracks or rewind
them. ALso you can accept or decline calls, and turn the light
on/off. The remote has a standard removable
watch battery.
Here is the mount which is a
small plastic piece with a rubber
gasket underneath to keep it stable. This
is pretty flexible to mount and has
posts built in on the side that you
use to mount it to either your stem or
anywhere you'd like with
the provided rubber straps. Now let's take a look at
the weight of the helmet, obviously with
the integrated battery and electronics this
is going to be a little bit heavier than
your traditional helmet. If we look at
the weight of the remote with its mount,
the rubber pad and the
two rubber straps that comes out to 30
gram. If we add the helmet on top of that
we have a total of 438 grams.
Now let's take a closer look at the
Coros SafeSound Urban helmet, as I
mentioned this is the white color,
medium size helmet. They also have a black color
version of this as well as a road bike
and mountain bike versions that have
similar features but different designs.
This has 10 different vents for cooling
and it has the an urban style
that many helmets have now. This has
more of a skater style helmet with a smooth shell
and it comes fairly low on the rear for
extra protection. Let's start from the
backside of the helmet, you can see this
is the integrated tail light. You have a
single power button, if I hold it for two
seconds you can hear this is powering
off and if I hold it again for another
two seconds it will power on. The
LED light confirms the actions
and that's a really nice feature.
The tail light actually lights up in
segments to indicate the charge status
as well, which is a really nice feature
so you know when you're charging how
much you have to go. You have that single
button and underneath it you have a covered
USB port. It is a micro USB port for
charging and you also have a simple
BOA style adjustment knob here.
It is bi-directional, clockwise to tighten
and counterclockwise to loosen it. This makes
adjusting the helmet for any size head
very simple. If we come around to the side
you can see we have the Coros logo,
this is just a simple sticker. On
top you have two colors, here you have
this black plastic and then the
white shell on top which looks pretty
good. Here we have the speakers that are
built in to these nylon straps with a
simple adjustment here, according to the
instructions you're supposed to adjust
the strap be directly underneath your
ear. If you're wondering how the wiring
works for the speakers these are
actually wired into the helmet and I can
sort of show you that by giving you a
close-up of the strap. You see the
protrusion here, that's the wiring for
the speakers that goes into the helmet
itself. One downside of all these
electronics is that they're all
integrated in and are not
removable. If you do have an accident
you will have to replace this $200
helmet, and cannot replace the speaker's
independently or the taillight
independently. If we go to the front you can
see this very nice smooth shell and
this secondary gray color with
a suble pattern on it too.
It's a nice little touch and the helmet also has a
really great spot for mounting a
headlight on too. It's very easy to drop
a headlight between these two vents and
with the smooth exterior design it's very
easy to mount any light on here.
Unlike road cycling helmets that
have really aggressive styling, the SafeSound urban
really lends itself really well to
mounting. You also get this built
in cap, it is removable with Velcro and is a
really nice touch as it blocks the Sun when
you're riding. On the inside we have
these really nice plush pads
in here. These are all removable and can
be cleaned, I highly recommend doing that
every few months as they get pretty
nasty, and this is a very comfortable
head helmet.
Everyone we've had test this has come
back saying this is the most
comfortable helmet they've ever used.
It's a combination of the shape
and the really soft padding on here.
Now let's take a look at the Coros app,
it offers a couple options. You can turn
the tail lights on and off, and every
time you turn them on or off they'll try
to sync with the helmet. Sometimes that
syncing fails as you see here, but most
the time it works and when it works you
see the update. You can also enable a
voice feedback feature and that'll
remind you about your distance if you
have a cycling activity active. You
can do it either do it based on distance or
time, there is also a speeding warning
and this is a little bit optimistic. It
goes all the way up to 60 miles an hour
which seems excessive.
You can sync the remote, however once
you do all you see the ID.
I'm not really sure why this feature
is here as you can't customize any of the
hold options. What you see is what you get. You
can change the language, and you can do a
firmware update. You should
definitely do this if you purchase it
because they have done a number of bug
updates. You can also view the user
manual directly from the app but as you
can see this is a dead link. I
assume this will be fixed in future
releases of the app. One of the major
things you can do with the app is set
the emergency contacts this is the SOS
feature and if it detects a collision it
will go through this list of contacts
which you can either enter manually or
from your contacts to text in case of an
emergency.
The other interesting thing is you can
start a cycling activity and as you can
see this provides you a really simple
interface to see your speed, distance and
average speed. Coros actually does a
lot of smartwatches, so that's one reason
I'm more optimistic that they will maintain
the apps and keep adding features. If we
go through the other tabs of the
app you can see you have Fitness
stats, you can list your previous
workouts and you also have a
cool profile page where you get badges
and track your total progress.
Whether it's swimming running or biking
the pretty nice features overall. So now
let's take a look at the tail light
that's integrated in helmet. As you can
see it's not that bright, especially
compared to a normal tail light but it
does do a good job of drawing attention
to you because the light is higher up
versus a tail light which is on your
seat post.
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Now lets test the audio quality of the
Coros SafeSound by recording the
audio from the receiving an end of the call
while calling from helmet phone.
As you can hear and see there is ambient noise from the
cars and wind. However overall
the audio quality is better than we expected.
Now if we pull over and come to a
complete stop, you can hear the audio
quality is much better without all the
noise. Now let's go over the pros and
cons of the Coros SafeSound helmet. One
pro is that's very easy to set up right
out of the box, you can sync it with your
cell phone and the remote and everything
just simply works. The remote also
provides a lot of easy access to the
features, I've mounted that on my stem
and I really like it. You can just
adjust the volume, accept or
decline calls and even fast forward
tracks so if you have Pandora you
can skip tracks. The last Pro is the
runtime is pretty impressive for the
battery size, I have found that I don't really have
to charge it except for maybe once a
week. Some of the cons for these kind of
helmets are the integrated electronics.
This is not specific to the Coros but
with most of these the electronics are
non-removable so if you did have an
accident or one headphone were to break
there are not a lot of replacement parts
available. Once you're out of warranty
you won't be able to keep maintain this
so it's not very future proof. The other
thing I found is the headphones tend to
rotate away from my ear, I saw this in
other reviews as well. They're designed
to sit flush but depending on your
head size they can rotate.
Lastly the Cros app has limited
customization options, there's not much
you can do aside from setting the
emergency contacts or doing activity
tracking. Now let's give the SafeSound
Urban helmet a final rating, out of 10 I
would give it an 8 and a half I think
it's a really cool helmet for modern
riders. It replaces a bunch of other
gadgets like wireless headphones, tail
light into one really nice comfortable
helmet. I was a little hesitant about the
helmet
when I first got it because of the
integrated electronics and the higher
cost, but having ridden with it now
for a while I really like it it's great
for kind of riding around the city and
doing commuting you can listen to your
music you can take calls all while
maintaining spatial awareness.
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This is The Sweet Cyclists reminding you to enjoy
the ride.
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