SRAM has updated the design of its Blip satellite shifters, making them wireless. The brand says the new Wireless Blips will be available to buy in April and a pair of the remotes will retail for £90 / €100 / $100.
The Blips will be compatible with all SRAM’s road, gravel and mountain bike eTap AXS groupsets, connecting to the shifters and derailleurs via Bluetooth.
Removing the wires means the Blips are a lot more versatile than their predecessors, which had to be hardwired into the shifters.
The new Blips can be fixed to any point on a bike. That opens up plenty of new opportunities for how and where gearing is controlled from on regular bikes, but ostensibly is of the most value to time trialists and disabled cyclists with unconventional setups.
SRAM eTap AXS Blips: Self-contained units
The wireless Blips ship with multiple attachment options, including clip-on mounts for TT bars as well as good old double-sided tape, so SRAM says the rider should find them easy to mount wherever they’re required.
The units themselves are sealed. There is no option to charge or replace the batteries, meaning the Blips are essentially disposable items once their power has been used up.
While appearing wasteful on the face of it, SRAM says the Blips are recyclable, but should last the average rider up to seven years before running out of juice anyway. Battery life can be monitored via SRAM’s AXS app.
There self-contained nature contributes to the units being small and neat, and imbues them with a IPX7 waterproof rating. That should mean they’ll remain functional no matter how grotty the conditions they are used in, making them ideal for idiosyncratic gravel bike setups, for example.
SRAM eTap AXS Blips: One-click wonders
In order to set them up, the new Blips need to be paired with an eTap AXS shifter, BlipBox, or Zipp’s Vuka Shift aero bars, but once this is done they can be used without any supporting hardware.
For now, the Blips differ from the wired versions and SRAM’s eTap AXS control levers in the fact that they can only actuate one shift per press.
They can’t be held down to prompt multi-shifts or operate a Reverb eTap AXS dropper post, although SRAM says a firmware update will enable this functionality at an undisclosed point in the future.