Bosch Smart System Review: LED Remote, Kiox 300, Flow App

Rail 9.9 xx1 axis with the bosch led remote and the kiosk 300. These are both part of the bosch smart system with their new cx motor, even though, apparently it offers the same 85 newton meters of torque and its kind of the same hardware. This is the smart system and in the future, it can do more. For now were a little bit limited, but it does have an app to me. This is really its kind of three things in one theres, the led remote, which you can use to operate the bike all on its own, then theres, the removable kiocks 300 display panel. You kind of spring it down from the top and then lift up like that. The new kiox 300 appears to charge directly from the bike power source the main battery, whereas the older antuvia and original kiocks. I think they had rechargeable coin batteries inside that eventually would wear out you kind of have to replace them. So i feel like thats an improvement here as well. Two inches diagonal on this display, its very similar to the other kiox, just its geox 300. There are a few changes on the readouts well get into that in a minute, but lets start out just with the led remote so to power. The bike on theres, a button on top here, press that comes to life pretty quickly and theres. A little led dance here with the blue dots and then every time it says, warning avoid distracted.

Writing read the safety instructions at first i was like. Oh is. This touch screen does not seem like that. You have to press the little square icon or select icon over here, so we do that and then you get into the standard readouts but again lets focus on the led remote. If we didnt have the kiosk 300, all we would have. Is these five charge level indicators and at first i thought: do these represent twenty 20 increments? You know 100 divided by 5. Well, no, they actually step down in halfs. And so, if we were at 90 wed only see four blue dots and then the top one would turn white, so thats sort of a half step, and i think thats really nice, because it is. It is important to sort of estimate your range, especially if youre, really on a long ride. You dont want to get stranded with a heavy bike. Of course, this is an all carbon fiber. You know super premium, expensive e bike, but it still weighs quite a bit because weve got the new bosch power tube 750. So you know versus the 625. We do have a little bit more weight, thats part of the bosch smart system as well. So its really nice that weve got kind of the 10 increments and then weve got this other line here that fills in as soon as we change a cyst levels, so green its the lowest level of assist thats eco and we go up to tour plus, which Is blue, emtb kind of a purple, turbo, red and and thats really it? You know, weve got these other buttons here, but they dont really do anything for the led remote, even the select button, its just just kind of there.

One thing thats interesting is the plus button does have a light icon. So if you hold down on that, if this bike had lights, it would activate them. If we hold the minus icon here, it activates walk mode and the leds turn to this. Like white kind of moving pattern, but the bike doesnt do anything until you start to move it yourself and then the motor will kick in. You can see the little guy there saying yep, we got walk, assist happening again, nice if youve got a heavier bike and you get a flat tire or maybe its a commuter setup, and you need to move the bike without dumping. Your cargo theres one more goodie to show you with the led remote and i almost missed it, and i wanted to go in and double check, but at the bottom of the plus and the minus theres, a little rubber cover with a tool icon and a usbc Charging port i went online ive got some documentation ill link to in the forums. Initially, i thought oh, its got the tool thing. Maybe this is just for diagnostics and stuff, but now you upgrade this thing with the smartphone app. So i was, you know, double checking. It looks like its 5 volts 600 milliamp hours, which is enough to charge some of the newer devices. If you have your smartphone up here, maybe youre using it for gps or something – and maybe you got a speaker or a light or something i mean.

This smart system is going to be on more bikes in the future, really cool that theyve included that the position of it isnt perfect. In my opinion, because look we got this dropper lever right here, so i actually have a usb c charging cable right here. I actually plug in the usb type, a port and then use this to charge my gopros so im kind of going in reverse. Here you might need to get a special custom one of these. If youre going to charge your phone or something just go on amazon, but if i, if i plug this in look at that, i mean its its right there in the way of the dropper lever. And you know you can get like a right angle. One of these – and hopefully it stays in because i can imagine you know its – it doesnt seem that secure to me. I guess it kind of locked in there, but just something to to to think about when youre setting this up, i mean gravitys going to be pulling this down if were hitting, drops and stuff with a mountain bike like this and youd have to wrap this up. Here its its not perfect, i kind of like it if it was on top or maybe right here. That would be great. You could get a really short cable and then it would be sideways versus pointing right down, but its just an interesting situation, because the antuvia, the kiox, the nion, they all have micro, usb charging ports and the purion, the really simple small display it does.

But that ones only for diagnostics, so, like most of the current generation displays, do let you charge this new one appears to, but the positioning isnt great and we have the highest capacity battery of all and on on this bike on this trek, 9.9 xx1 axis, you Know weve got electric everything its like electric shifting electric tire pressure gauges, suspension gauges, even the dropper post, so everything is using electricity and as much as possible, i would enjoy having a big rechargeable battery to pull from you know, and that includes my phone. It includes. I im just really im focusing on this because i hope bosh hears it its nice to have and if just a little bit of thought on how they position it could make it so much more usable thats, pretty much it for the led remote on its own. However, its the remote, not the kiox 300, that connects with bluetooth to the smartphone app so im going to go ahead and show you that next so there it is its the flow app which to me was a little bit confusing. I thought it should have been called the smart system app because thats. What were dealing with here is the smart system. When i search the app store, i had to double check that i was on the right one. So theres me, it says: heres quartz ebike were ready to go. Congratulations on the smart system! Heres your battery! I love that it shows battery percentage here, its even more precise than what we had on the led remote weve got range here and thats dynamic, depending on the level of assist that were in so were in turbo, which again is that red and its estimating 36 Miles we can customize some of the ride modes here.

Only turbo and eco, though we cant change, emtb or tour, plus tour, plus and emtb theyre kind of similar emtb gives you more power and and kind of zippy feeling and tours a little bit more conservative and efficient, but basically theyre giving you the full range of Power and torque, and it really depends on how hard youre pedaling its not just like low medium high, its like, maybe high, if youre, really working for it or maybe low, if youre, just kind of relaxed. So its a way to be efficient and a little bit more dynamic and responsive. I think thats kind of cool and i guess i can see why they cant really give you a whole lot of adjustability on these dynamic modes. So if we go into turbo, we could change assistance. The support level change, how dynamic it feels soft or powerful. When you start and then we can even adjust the top speed and the maximum torque. So theres really a lot that you can do in here. Interesting that 19 miles per hour is the top speed. Ive always thought it was kind of 20 thats, the top assisted speed limit in the united states or in north america in europe, 25 kilometers per hour 15.5 miles per hour and everythings color coded just like. We saw on the led remote then down here we can see how many miles weve gone for each different level of assist, which is kind of cool theres, a map tool.

So you can see where youve gone and in fact this thing automatically records your your routes and keeps a log for you and then theres. This statistics thing, which is pretty cool. This would connect to apple health or strava. We can see that over here in connected services, so apple health data im, not using that so its just kind of empty right. Now we can change my profile a little bit if we want delete trips, delete your account, its actually fairly simple right now, its not too too deep. You know theres marketing messages, help center feedback terms and conditions, privacy, policies, service, description, corporate information and one of the last things you can do here is check for updates. So you can update the bike yourself without having to go into a shop. I think thats pretty cool, so this isnt the kind of app where id want to mount my phone and and expect to see how fast im going or you know how much energy the bike is putting out compared to me its its really just sort of a Set it and then forget it. So now we move on to the kiox 300 itself. The cool thing is that, depending on where you left it, which which menu, when you turn the bike off and on we, we boot it back up waiting waiting, keocks, 300. Okay, it gives us the distracted driving thing again. It stays on that that last menu, so thats really convenient um again, i want to reiterate that the leds on the button pad and the display right here, theyre, both adaptive so if its really bright out theyll be brighter and if its dark theyre going to dim.

So you dont dazzle your eyes thats the bosch terminology, but basically you dont want to ruin your night vision. So i really appreciate that, because there are a lot of e bikes out there, especially the cheaper ones, with big circular leds that theyre always on super bright and sometimes ill use like masking tape, just to kind of mute that a little bit for night riding. So, im not getting blinded or ill ill tip it and kind of swivel it out of the way. This thing is mounted uh really nicely its elevated and it fits right over the brake lever, housing and its just um its actually really nice. I i at first, i wasnt sure some of the the bosch button pads are theyre, just not as easy to click as this. This is very tactile. You can hear it, you can feel it. It feels its very reachable, its ergonomic im. This is like becoming my my favorite uh control pad as it were, and im not sure im in love with where weve mounted the keox 300 on this particular bike, because you know youre way up here riding and you might want to kind of glance down and Thats, the idea with the the colors here is that you dont have to read something you can just kind of sense it and get familiar with the colors which um again theyre theyre consistent across the app and the the different devices. But its still, you know its a lot of looking if the display is way down here now.

This is pretty pretty well protected. This is an all mountain bike right with 160 millimeter travel 150 in the rear its you know, this is a mountain bike and if you, if you dropped it or flipped it or something like that, it feels like the display is really well protected and it comes Back to being able to remove that which i love but lets jump back into the different uh menus here. So weve got this left and right page button select, plus minus that we went through before so im going to go back to the very first one. Its got a little square icon next to it. So you know, battery percentage assist level is always shown along with the colors clock, and then settings down here well go to settings at the very end. If i page to the the right, we get your average speed max speed, distance riding time, speed its like current speed, again its in kilometers per hour right now, but ill show you how to change that later range, so thats, again dynamic based on what level of Assist so if we go from eco up to two or plus our estimated range uh changes significantly, so we drop way down to 68 on emtb and turbo 58. They have a lot of space here, so i guess they just created this little its like a measuring tape, icon to signal like thats range and then down here. We have like a little battery infographic 94 kind of wonder if this ticks down.

As you use the battery thatd be kind of cool power, watts cadence rpm, so you know how quickly spin one of the cool things about the the bosch performance line motors is that they support over 120 rpm per second, which is just really high. It means you can go spinning, spinning spinning, which happens when you downshift, as youre approaching, like a big climb or something and on some of the older systems. If you did that youd lose motor support, so i love that they they still give you really high cadence support. There. We go were back to the the first menu here with settings. We press the little square button and now weve got a bunch of different information. Now see how theres a right arrow there, we can either press right to get into it or the the square. So im going to press the square, we can reset our range. You know auto tr reset, so it can reset itself wheel, circumference components lets look into this control unit drive unit battery display lets get into some of these. So, im this time, im using the right arrow component led remote serial number part number software, okay, now im using left, drive unit serial number part number operating hours, total distance software version, just tons of information here, battery yep power tube 750. Serial number part number software display geox, 300 yep, okay, so just kind of a lot of really detailed information lets get uh back here to the system, its got language units.

This is where we can change it to. I guess im gon na have to press the square to change this to imperial, so that would be miles per hour instead of kilometers per hour time. We can change the time format, brightness automatic thats. What i was talking about before and uh settings reset so thats thats interesting lets, lets go ahead and do that? Yes, no okay! We dont want to do that right now and then information contact, youve, got questions frequently asked questions. Theres their website certificates, its like ul certified bosh, does a really good job with that so thats kind of it. You know thats the system um, it does automatically power off, but if we power it off ourselves, it gives us the trip summary distance ride. Time average speed max speed, average power average cadence calories, total distance cu. I want to go back in one more time and just describe maybe one of my my favorite views thats carried over from the original kiocks here its this one right here. So it shows your current speed and then theres this like loop and it fills up with motor power and human power, so the the solid dark, color thats, how hard the motor is working and then the little gradient color on top of it thats your input. So you can see how you, plus the bike, really combine to create a good level of assistance. You know how hard youre working versus how hard the bike is working that comes back to which level of assist youre, using and and how you dial in those settings.

Um, i hope this helps you guys. I enjoy going deep into these because theres so many settings and one of the really neat things about the bosch product line is that most of their displays in the past have been um cross compatible. So if you have like the original bosch performance line, cx you could have a pyrion or an antuvia and then you could upgrade to a kiosk or an ion. Now you know this is a brand new generation, the smart system, so youre youre really limited to just these right now and uh you cant its not as cross compatible, and so, if youre, making a choice right now to buy an electric bike and its like. Oh, do i pay more for a smart system enabled bike? I just wanted to be real thorough to show you what you get whats different and i and i really do like this button pad. I mean this kind of replaces the purion it doesnt give you a bunch of readouts the way that one does, but i do like the way that they handle the leds. The charge, level and stuff so anyway ill be doing a review on this bike and just more updates in the future. I love you guys. I hope this helps have fun.