The BeeLine is a bicycle navigation device built around an idea that other GPS solutions seem to have forgotten: Cycling is fun. Not just aerobic-workout fun, or sure-beats-a-car commute fun, but “Let’s tool around the city and see some interesting stuff, perhaps on our way to a bar” kind of fun.

To that end, the BeeLine, a (fully funded) Kickstarter campaign, doesn’t so much give you directions as give you suggestions. Carried on your keychain when not in use, it’s a slim disk with an e-paper display that straps to your bikes handlebar and pairs via Bluetooth with your smartphone. The simple readout tells you the distance to your destination, and points a large arrow toward it. You, intrepid cyclist, are left to make routing decisions based on traffic conditions, shady lanes, fragrant foliage, street carnivals, and that cupcake shop that you’re pretty sure is around here somewhere. These are the things that bikers should be paying attention to, not tiny phonescreen maps or screeching turn-by-turn directions. BeeLine's creators, the London-based industrial-design consultancy Map, calls this sort of as-the-crow-flies guidance "fuzzy navigation."

The system leverages the GPS functionality of your phone for the heavy computing, and the BeeLine app leverages Google Maps for the location data. The disk itself contains an accelerometer, a magnetometer and a gyroscope for further precision, and there's a backlight for nighttime rides. These components have low power drain, so the BeeLine can go months at a time between recharges via USB.

We imagine the BeeLine — which will retail for £60 (about $90) being perfect for a lazy ride through a new city, so long as you can recognize “Dead End” in the local language. If there are bridges that must be crossed, lakes that must be avoided, or views that must be taken in, the app allows the rider to program waypoints into the journey. There’s a smart team behind both the physical and technological designs of the BeeLine, and they foresee all sorts of functionality that could be added with simple software updates. But we hope they aren’t in any hurry for that — we’ll get there eventually.

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