Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Please understand, I am a Sena fan. So I am predisposed to want them to succeed. I love my SMH-10, and my Sena GoPro bluetooth backpack. I have had tens of thousands of trouble free miles with my riding buddy (separate bikes), with my wife (pillion), and solo with the SMH-10, and the GoPro backpack. But the 50S is absolute garbage. I am a complete gadget head, a techie, and a computer nerd. Call me what you like, but everyone I know calls me for tech support. I can make stuff work. This thing does not work. I swear this is the thing that they make in the Dilbert comics. PROS: -Extra bass in speakers makes podcasts easier to hear at slightly higher speeds than SMH-10 (Sadly, this makes music muddy and inaudible at significantly lower speeds than the SMH-10). -Extra bass in speakers makes Bluetooth intercom easier to hear than SMH-10 -Can listen to music while in Mesh Mode, sort of. -Has mesh mode (if you're willing to give up Bluetooth intercom with other Sena devices). -It looks pretty (too bad they chose form over function). CONS that might possibly be fixed with future firmware updates: -Ambient mode DOES NOT WORK AT ALL. All it picks up is your head moving LOUDLY inside your helmet. you can barely hear people shouting right next to you, and only if they are on your left (where the mic allegedly is). -Listening to music while connected via Bluetooth intercom (Sena calls this Bluetooth Intercom Audio Multitasking) DOES NOT WORK AT ALL. You just get extremely choppy music. -Smart volume control DOES NOT WORK AT ALL. I have no further detail on this, it just doesn't do anything. Maybe it will do something after a firmware update or something? -Listening to music while Mesh is enabled (Sena calls this Mesh Intercom Audio Multitasking) only sort of works, but not how you would want it to. When you transmit or receive, you can chose for it to duck (turn down) or not duck your music, but you can not chose how much it ducks. You can only chose the sensitivity of its decision to duck. It's full blast, or imperceptible, but nothing in between. -Bluetooth intercom connections become very poor, and are extremely short range when Mesh is enabled. You also get the "Popcorn" sound that the 20 series is so infamous for, even at very short range. -App is garbage. It fails to connect to the headset most of the time, even though the headset is connected to the phone, and playing music. Much of the terminology makes no sense, so it's hard to get anything done, and even harder to undo. -The EQ is an OUTRIGHT LIE. There are three presets (Bass boost, Mid boost & Treble boost) and off. That's barely tone preference, it is absolutely not an equalizer. -The "WiFi" charge cord is almost impossible to set up, and when it finally succeeds at connecting to your WiFi, it tells you that it failed. It took me at least 10 attempts to connect the app to the cord. After that, it took at least 30 attempts before I finally got it connected to my home WiFi. -Bluetooth intercom distance while mesh was enabled was about 250-300 meters (or yards if you like, they are about the same at that range) on a straight road with uninterrupted line of sight, it was about 400m with Mesh turned off. Sena's claim of 1600m is an absolute LIE. Even at 200m, the instant I saw my friend's head go beyond the crest of a hill, we lost intercom connection. The SMH-10 works much, much better than that. -Battery life is terrible. From full charge, while listening to music, and while mesh was enabled, I was down to 64% in about an hour and 15 minutes (~30 miles). -Voice control is a sadistic joke. At best, it replaces some (not all) of the simple single button press functions. Anything you would really want voice control for is several menus deep in the Sena 50 App. CONS that can not even be fixed with a firmware update: -Ergonomics of this thing SUCK!!!!!!!!!!! I wear liner-less deerskin gloves, and this thing is almost impossible to use. God help you if you ride a Snowmobile. -You can't even find the jog wheel, let alone use it. If you manage to find it by accident, then you've already turned it or pressed it. The only thing I could do reliably and predictably was slide my thumb on the edge of it, but that feels like the reverse of manipulating the jog wheel of an SMH-10, because you roll it down to turn the volume up, and up to turn it down. -The phone button is lower compared to the SMH-10, so you have to rotate your hand uncomfortably far to use it. This was a REAL PITA, since I found myself power cycling the thing almost every time I needed to connect to the app to access a setting that should have been available with a voice command. -The "Ambient Mode" button is impossible to find. This may be a moot point since, as I stated earlier, "Ambient Mode" does not work at all. -The "Mesh" button is difficult, but not impossible to find. You can't actually feel it, but you can feel the ridge behind it, and you know it's right there in front of the ridge, so you can make it work faster than the rest of the buttons. -The Mesh antenna is impossible to raise with gloves on. CONCLUSION: Dear Sena, I really, really wanted you to win the intercom war. Motorcycling is the reward for our work-a-day lives. It's what we work for. It's what we live for. But it's not easy. It's not even safe. The SMH-10 did something that is almost impossible. It made motorcycling better. It added convenience without adding complication. It added fun without adding danger. It simplified communication. It minimized our time with our hands off the bars, and it never required us to take our eyes off the road. The Sena 20 was crap, and you knew that. I was willing to give you a pass, because I thought it must just be growing pains, a sophomore misstep. An attempt to add features that sort of fell fell flat, and sounded like popcorn. Then you made the 30 series. An answer to the Cardo devices that was pushed out the door much too soon. I gave that a pass too, because Mesh networking blindsided us both, and you had to answer with something. As we all know now, Mesh 2.0 on the 30 series would probably have killed Cardo three years ago. Today, its barely worth mentioning to an entire "Pack" of talkers. But now, in your senior year, you give us the 50 series, which is obviously just the 30 series with speakers that are almost as good as the 10 series and a firmware upgrade that we should have had two years ago. You made it hard to use, and you crippled the functions we actually appreciate. The SMH-10 was so good, that it convinced me of four things. It convinced me that you cared about motorcycling. It convinced me that you cared what your customers wanted. It convinced me that you wanted to make a product that worked. And it convinced me that you might even be motorcyclists. The Sena 50S has only convinced me of only two things. It has convinced me that the SMH-10 was a fluke, and it convinced me that not only are you not motorcyclists, but that you don't even know any motorcyclists whom you could ask to try this thing before sending it to market.