One of our regular readers, Brian in Florida, USA, has been out and about with a new steadicam-like mounting system for generic smartphones - in the video below, he demonstrates it by strapping his Nokia 808 onto his chest and going for a bike ride over rough terrain. Effectively your own arms and legs (and, in this case, saddle!) provide the steadicam action - but the Velocity Clip does seem worth a look, whatever smartphone you own.

Brian writes:

As you know, I am always looking to new tech gadgets to make my Nokia 808 (and other smartphones) take better photos and video. The family and I started biking recently, and I wanted to film some of our outings.

So I started looking into ways to mount my 808 on my bike to capture some video. Everything I tried resulted in horribly violent shaking video. I doubt even the 1020's video stabilization would help much with the off-road mountain biking we are doing.

Nevertheless, I finally found a website with a relatively new product which is a universal mounting option that will fit all smartphones, and has optional accessories for a chest mount, helmet mount, bike mount, and special adhesive mounts for you to mount the phone to virtually anything you like.

The product is called Velocity Clip and basically any smartphone users (like me) who don't want to shell out a lot of money for a 'go phone action camera' can use this. I used the chest mount accessory for my 808 and went for a ride with the family on an off-road trail. The results riding a bicycle on a flat pavement are almost Steadicam smooth. And the results on an off-road bike trail are excellent (in my opinion) using my 808. See the video below. 

NB: once you start playing, up the quality in the settings to '720p' for best effect.

Thanks Brian. Quite impressive - yes, many of the top end Lumias include OIS, but as Brian says, even these can't cope with the sort of macroscopic shaking associated with a push bike bouncing off bumps on a track. Turns out that human-stabilisation and an innovative chest mount does a great job though - comments welcome!

PS. Embedded below for your interest is the official promo video for the Velocity Clip. Note that we (or Brian) have no affiliation with the company, this is purely unsoilicited testimony(!)