Being a cyclist myself, I love seeing all the new advances to help keep bikes and their riders safe, and Skylock is at the top of my list for a bunch of cool reasons.
The Skylock bike lock is a solar powered, Bluetooth enabled, wifi connected, theft alerting, crash reporting bike lock that can lock and unlock automatically as it senses your presence. This upcoming gadget is so intelligent, it might even be smarter than a 5th grader. Ha.
It communicates with your phone via Bluetooth (or WiFi, when you’re out of Bluetooth range), and the Skylock app ( iOS and Android) lets you tailor the lock settings to enable auto-lock, adjust the tamper sensitivity levels — how much jostling the lock can take before it triggers a theft alert, and who to notify in the event of a crash.
Yes, a crash.
If your bike (with Skylock attached) and your phone go down, the app can notify specific contacts that you’ve had an accident. Kind of like what Automatic Driving Assistant does for drivers. This feature totally sold me; I’d be glad to carry the extra weight of a lock on long rides simply for the security of automatic crash reporting.
The really neat thing is that this all works via a solar panel that fully recharges in only five hours of direct sunlight. The charge lasts for a month, even with daily use of the lock. Plus, Skylock is super tough. It’s designed to resist all attacks, both physical and cyber.
The only bad news? Skylock won’t be available until next year. They’re taking pre-orders now (at a huge discount), and Skylock is expected to ship in early 2015. But we’re betting it will be worth waiting for.
Get all the details for preorders on the Skylock website, where the Skylock FAQ is super helpful
