This is my review of the Ellipse smart bike lock. I wanted to share my experience with the product thus far and my frustrations with it. Ellipse is a Bluetooth enabled smart bike lock which is also solar charged. It offers many useful functions such as lock sharing where you could share your lock with other people's smartphones by pairing it with more than one device. I have used this functionality with my girlfriend, and we have been sharing the lock between each other. It also offers bike theft alerts when it detects motion. Let’s start with some pre-history and explain what got me exited about this product.
Pre-History
Lattis formerly known as Skylock by Velo Labs was a Kickstarter project back in 2014 (as far as I recall). They posted this really cool video of a Bluetooth-enabled bike lock. At the moment I saw the video, I was hooked, and I started digging for more information. After I saw they were in a concept stage, I somehow ignored the startup for some time. Back in 2015 I stumbled upon their website again and saw that they were close to a product release. Their web page stated that they would be shipping the lock in late 2015 and offered an exclusive price of $159 for early investors. At that time I just got a new bike and was looking for a more secure lock. I placed an order on in May 2015 and started my countdown. Here is a proof of their statement back in 2015:
I paid USD 226 including VAT and shipping to Austria. They stated that the future price of the lock will be USD 245 and that customers are getting a real bargain here. I believed them because I thought that a startup would need fresh money coming in to fund the future production. Today's official price is $199. Here is an old statement:
Time passed by and I got an exiting email in July 2015 including some company updates and shipping info. Here is what they stated:
“Since our last update, Skylock has completed its final and most critical milestone to start mass production (read: shipping your lock!). After nine months of manufacturing preparation, we will begin building thousands of Skylocks in August.”
We are still in 2015 and in August I got new email stating the following:
“As announced in our last update, we'll start manufacturing thousands of Skylocks later this month”
Ok, so you would be thinking “What’s wrong with the updates?” They seem to keep their customers up to date. Well…yes, but I got my Ellipse bike lock in June 2017! In the meantime, my bike got stolen while I was using a cheaper lock because they managed to convince me that I will get my new lock by the end of 2015. Long story short I got the lock, and I started using it with my new bike. Everything worked fine until I started noticing some inconsistencies. I noticed that the range of the Bluetooth was not as strong as advertised earlier. I barely managed to connect to the lock when I was more than 5 meters away (tested on iPhone 6 and Galaxy S7). This was not a huge dealbreaker for me, but still, it was annoying. They advertised their alert function where the lock would notify the owner if a theft is detected. Guess what - if I am 5 meters away from my bike I would probably have it in plain sight, so I wouldn't need any alerts. I totally ignored that function.
When everything went to hell
One summer day I left my bike outside and it started raining. When I got back my capacitive touch display stopped working. This is actually a big issue because you need the display to pair the lock with other smartphones. I messaged support and I got a response in August stating that they have charging issues and I need to charge my lock for at least 72 hours. This did not fix the issue for me. My display was still malfunctioning.
We apologize for the delay. Our developers have found most of the returned locks with issues such as yours are not defective, just not fully charged. They request you charge your lock using a wall charger for 72 full hours (3 days) before you return your lock for inspection. If you still must return your lock, and our developers find it to be defective, we will issue a refund.
For reference, this is how the capacitive touch display should look like when you tap on it:
On top of that, I noticed that my lock stopped charging from the solar panel. I left the lock for days under the sun, and my battery never charged. It also seemed that my battery is either too small or malfunctioning because I had to charge the lock every night after I got back from work. One cold day the unthinkable happened. It was the first really cold day, and I left my bike outside. The temperatures fell to 5 degrees celsius, and my lock died. Let me state that I was charging the lock every night after I got back home because of malfunctioning battery. So I couldn’t do anything but leave my bike outside and return with a portable battery and try charging the lock in order to unlock it. Luckily my plan worked, and I managed to free my bike from this disappointment called smart lock. All of this really has been a frustrating experience for me, and I have been in contact with the Lattis support since August. Today is 19th of November, and I am still waiting for my refund. I already gave up on the money, and I am writing this post to warn people not to buy the Ellipse smart bike lock. There is nothing good about it. Oh did I mention that it takes more time to unlock the device when compared to a normal lock because of slow Bluetooth connection?
Conclusion
The Lattis smart bike lock by Ellipse is a very controversial product. It had a really shady pre-history and delivered a half-baked product to their customers. The company redesigned their website more than three times and also completely rebranded from the old name Skylock. They have been postponing the product release for years (first product release statement was aimed at early 2015). The lack of proper support has been one of my worst experience with a company, and I find it difficult to recommend the product to anyone. Let me sum up all the issues I had with the device. The Bluetooth connection is relatively weak, unlocking the device is slow compared to key-enabled locks. The solar panel never worked, and the battery has been malfunctioning since I got the lock. The capacitive touch display on the side of the lock stopped working after the first rainy day. After all bad things I mentioned about it, I must confess that the lock provides very high security (when it works).