This past summer I logged 5259 miles on calimoto. I’ve tried all the other mapping apps. Some come close but calimoto nailed it. I’m a dual sport rider so I like to find the most twisty and wild routes. Night before the ride play with the planner option. From there you can create straight or twisty routes. Drop way points on other roads to create your own route within. From OHV roads to interstate calimoto has it. Don’t need no map? Hit that tracking feature and record vital information. From on to offline calimoto has you covered. Found something wicked? Share that ride with friends or peeps around you. Save it for later so you can ride it again. Every ride tracks your stats. What was your altitude?, top speed?, Miles, Lean angle etc. etc. you can look at it all. This summer I can’t wait to ride. Calimoto has done work this winter and the app looks amazingly better.

This review is completely based upon what I was able to do in the app. I downloaded the app took a look at it and was ready for a test run for my next ride. The day came and we plotted out a route using the app, mind you it is one we ride frequently but I wanted to see how the app performed. Once I got the way points in and we were ready to take off I hit the start route button and nothing. Well not nothing, exactly. It took me to the screen to sign up for an $80 subscription. I am sure there was like a X amount of days before you are charged thing, but how many people forget to cancel before that time. Then you are out $80 for app that may or may not be good. Well, I don’t do that. Want to limit my access at first, cool, but you could easily set it up where you get 2-3 rides to check it out and then require the subscription. I don’t even have a problem paying for a sub if the app is good and the money is used to maintain the app. What I am not going to do is give money to something I can’t even test first. So based on my user experience of saving $80 and bot being able to use the app at all, you get 1 star.

This is my second year of use calimoto for my GPS on my bike, a Triumph T120. I used several others before, and this gave me the best routes. The problem that plagued others was the inserting of waypoints. They served no purpose, but passing through one would often make the rest of your ride disappear. It was weird. Calimoto doesn’t have that problem. I love their round trip function. Am 74 so I no longer go on long rides. I generally plan a trip that is a two hour round-trip from my house. It finds tons of new twisty roads I would never have found. My major complaint with calimoto is that they direct me often to Rhodes that are closed for construction. This never happens using conventional GPS apps like Apple, Google and Waze. My Garmin also avoids closed roads. The calimoto does a good job of rerouting, but it irritatingly keeps directing me along routes that have closed roads. Sometimes it has added 45 minutes to a ride to detour around those roads.

There’s a lot of Strava-like and wannabe Facebook apps for motorcyclists, and to be honest, I’m pretty over “social media”. I need an app that’s actually going to do something for me, not just feed my data into a hivemind under guise of “community”. Luckily, there’s also Calimoto, which is an actual tool for me to use when I feel like riding. The route planner tool is pretty awesome, and as a new rider I love being able to just pick a direction, the length, and have Calimoto find me a great round-trip route. Even without the route planner, the map view with twisty roads highlighted makes deciding on a rough route way easier than just using Apple Maps or similar. Also kudos to devs for making what feels like a pretty “solid” iOS app when some of the other motorcycle apps I’ve used seem pretty janky.