This was supposed to be a review of the Sena Impulse modular helmet.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still reviewing it. But it’s going to be a different review than it started off being, simply because of the experience I’ve had.
When this first arrived, I followed Sena’s instructions for pairing it with my phone for the first time. I used the Sena smartphone app, on my thoroughly modern smartphone, and paired with few problems. There’s a screen that pops up when you first open the app that guides you through the Bluetooth pairing process and includes a button (in the app, not on the helmet) to tap to see a Quick Guide.
At that time, the process worked. I paired the helmet with my phone, the Sena lady’s voice said “Hello” brightly, just as I’d learned to expect from using my old 20S for so many years. I literally have years of experience hearing Sena’s voice prompts in my headset, so I was pleasantly reassured when I found that had remained on this new helmet.
And then, somewhere in the months I’ve been riding with the Impulse, something went wrong. I’ve since paired this helmet with both Sena and Midland headsets, both via Bluetooth (not MESH). It was fiddly to get the non-Sena headset to pair, but it did it.
But somewhere along the way, the Impulse forgot its pairing with my phone. And also, somewhere along the way, the voice prompts seem to have shut themselves off.
This combination of things was annoying, but something I figured could be rectified if I could get them re-paired. Then I could check the settings and see about turning the voice prompts back on, or maybe even do a Factory Reset as a last resort if I couldn’t get it to work.
And that’s when the screaming started.
See, the app’s Quick Start guide had me doing a completely different pairing process with my phone that was only made harder by the completely unhelpful lack of voice prompts the Impulse was now exhibiting. No matter how well I followed those instructions, I couldn’t get my phone to even see the Impulse when I turned on Bluetooth and searched for Available Devices.
My partner located a lengthier Sena PDF (on the Sena website) for the Impulse helmet. It had a completely different two-button procedure (the Quick Guide only wanted you to use one button, of the four available on the helmet) to get the helmet into pairing mode.
The PDF method eventually worked. After much swearing and multiple threats to throw the entire thing out the window, we successfully got the Impulse re-paired with my phone.
And then, the settings showed that the voice prompts were indeed set to be On. They are still not switched on, friends. Not in any way that's audible, anyway.
There are no voice prompts in my helmet. My phone works just fine with it once again, and I can listen to music, or navigation, or make phone calls, or have intercom conversations.
But voice prompts? Out of the question, and turning them off (and the helmet off), then turning them on (and the helmet on) again to try to get them back accomplishes nothing.
That’s a problem when several features of this helmet rely on you using a combination of button presses of just four buttons to get into specific menus if you want to do specific things. Without voice prompts, it’s up to your best guess as to whether you’re in the correct menu or not. You might have the patience to fight through it, and maybe start over again if you miscount.
Or you could slowly lose your mind and want to throw this $600 helmet out the window. Your choice.
So really, this is a tale of two separate issues. One is, if you’re going to make every device dependent on its ability to interact with an app, then companies had better make absolutely sure that the information relayed to users via your app is both correct and up to date.
That’s clearly not the case with the Quick Guide in the Sena Motorcycles App right now. It’s telling me to do something completely different than the longer, fuller PDF manual for my helmet on the Sena website tells you to do if you want to pair the phone.
I mean, there are THREE separate Phone Pairing options in the User Manual. THREE. And the first one is not the same as the single option presented in the Quick Start guide via the App.
Also, nowhere in that first screen in the Sena app does it suggest that any alternate methods even exist, or even that there's a longer, fuller manual elsewhere.
Instead, it’ll let you go slowly insane when you keep trying the same button press over and over and getting nowhere.
Now, you might think to yourself, hey, I should probably go look for different instructions. But you also might not, because it’s Sena who’s telling you to do the wrong thing via its app. Not just some rando who may or may not have the right answer, but the manufacturer who made the helmet that you're currently trying to pair with your phone.
If you’re a company, you don’t want to destroy customer trust as soon as you’ve gotten your product into a customer’s hands, do you? I’d both think and hope you wouldn’t, anyway.
