This afternoon, a couple of us decided it would be a good idea to try out London’s new cycle hire scheme and take out one of the “Boris Bikes”.

Naturally, we had to add a small element of geekery to this process and try out the apps that are currently available to help with the hire process. These are mainly aimed at helping you to find the cycle stations nearest to you, but some give you information about how many bikes are available at a given station.

The first app we tried was the London Cycle App for theiPhone developed by FIPLAB Ltd. As with the others we tried, the interface was pretty basic but it did a good job of pinpointing cycle stations near the office, showing them on a map and letting you know how many slots there are at a station (but unfortunately not how many bikes are available). It also gives you directions to the cycle station, as well as allowing you to plot cycle routes from A to B.

Next up was London Cycle Hire for Android developed by Lock Stock. It had the same kind of interface as the iPhone app for finding stations near you, showing them on a map, displaying how many slots are there as well as giving you directions to the station. It lacks the ability to plot yourself an actual cycle route, but it does give you a handy little stopwatch so you can keep an eye on how long you’ve had the bike for (remember, that first 30 minutes is free!)

Finally, we used the Tfl web site and, as expected, it gives you a map view of your nearest cycle stations but with the added benefit of timestamped information on cycle availability.

Station hunting out of the way it was time to try out the actual bikes!

We headed over to the Hatton Garden station and had no trouble in undocking our chosen steed. The bike itself is heavy. I mean it weighs a ton. We like to think of ourselves as relatively fit chaps but we could barely lift this thing off the ground. I guess this is one part of the “vandal resistant” design, stopping the local oiks from tossing the things into canals and waterways across the capital.

Our chosen route was a jaunt down to Waterloo Cut, where we docked up, had a saunter about for 5 minutes and then grabbed another to get our second free 30 minutes.

You’re not going to win any races on these, in fact your not going to go anywhere very quickly on them at all – especially if your rear brake is stuck on like ours was for the return leg of the journey. The three gears operated by a grip-shift give you a little bit of flexibility depending on whether you’re going down, up or flat and the brakes are good enough to get a decent rear wheel skid.

There’s not much else to report on the bikes really. Personally, I think they’re an excellent investment for the city and will hopefully make those smaller, slightly annoying journeys a little bit easier – particularly if you don’t want to wait for a bus or tube and you can get from A to B in the free 30 minute period – but don’t expect to cover longer distances easily.