This morning I received my Double-O Bike Lights (front and rear) in the post. They were due on Christmas Eve but I wasn't available to take the package.
I helped fund the original kickstarter, back when the intention was to produce a light that attached magnetically to a fixed holster on the bike (easy to add/remove on-the-go) and shaped like a Polo mint so you could thread your light onto your D-lock when locking up.
In the months since then the design changed and the backers have been generally pretty angry about the change of direction. The changes include (a) no magnetic mount (b) no USB rechargeable battery. The Polo shape is still there. There is still a vestigial magnetic part in the design - the light faces have opposed poles so your front and rear light will "stick" together for easy threading onto your lock. (Curiously I have to feed them onto the lock before sticking them together - the curved leg on my Kryptonite D-lock will only fit through one light at a time.)
I've not used it other than to test it works - it seems quite bright but also there's a lot of surface area. The lit portion is about the size of digestive biscuit. No no, I've just checked, exactly the size of a McVitie's digestive. It's definitely a light "to be seen" not "to see by".
Installation with the new design is done by means of a thick rubber band built into the housing. One point is permanently attached to the case and the rest can be detached to loop round the back of whatever tube you're attaching it to, then clipped back onto the case again at the opposite side. If that's a terrible explanation it's probably because it's not an intuitive design. It took me far too long to work it out from the inscrutable diagrams.
This new mounting system is more fiddly than the original promised to be (see the original promo/funding call video for how the prototypes worked). It also doesn't work well on fat tubes: handlebars okay but chunky head tubes not necessarily.
Hopefully I'll get a chance to use it "on the streets" soon enough and see what it's like in action.
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