Product Spotlight: Car Phone Mount
Using your phone for navigation, traffic avoidance and music during a commute is great — everything you need, in a single device. Trying to get that device mounted to your car in such a way that it isn’t flopping around can be an exercise in frustration. After putting up with floppy, wobbly car mounts for years I finally ponied up for a more serious mount. After using it for a year or so without a single complaint, let’s shed some light on it.
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Magnetic phone mount
We use our phones for navigation and music and while one of our vehicles supports Android Auto, I find the whole Android Auto experience to be a bit of a party trick (that being said, I really do like the modified auto-layout for Waze!). Using the infotainment screen isn’t a reliable option for me since the UI isn’t nearly as responsive as my phone and more importantly, the screen is fixed and not that bright — so unless it’s nighttime, it’s almost under glare or always washed out.
I initially used a clamp-mount on a gooseneck with a suction cup — you know the type. It didn’t take long to switch over to using magnetic mounts and over the years I’ve used all of the common types: CD-player mount, friction-fit air-vent mount and clamping air-vent mount. The effectiveness of a mount is, obviously, largely dependant on the specific vehicle and how a user wants to interact with their phone but I think there are some common annoyances
The location of the CD player doesn’t work and/or the phone ends up blocking some controls (or the vehicle doesn’t have a CD player)
The orientation of the vents (vertical vs horizontals slits) means that the vent-mounts are more likely to slip (especially as phones get bigger)
Even if you don’t have slippage, now you’re blocking a vent!
All of this makes for a very frustrating experience (doubly so in the case of one vehicle I used — the mass of the phone mounted on the vertical-vents meant that when I turned hard or hit a bump, phone would flop to the side. The phone would stay attached to the mount but the entire vent would now be directed left/right and I couldn’t see the screen.
All in all, unnecessary aggravation.
All I wanted was a phone mount that doesn’t flippin move unless I want it to.
Part 1: the vehicle mount
I went with a ProClip mount for both our vehicles. The ProClip mount is vehicle specific and leverages the natural nooks and crannies on your vehicle to snap into place. The tension of the ABS mount provides the bulk of the holding force. I think most (if not all) of their mounts also leverage some 3M tape for the last bit of peace of mind, but I found the tension in the clip mount to be more than sufficient and didn’t opt to peel back the tape cover on either mount.
What makes this mount and those like it unique is that they focus on providing a super solid anchor point — you’re buying just the mount — the bits that clip onto your car. Installation for both vehicles was pretty painless with both detailed installation instructions or even a walkthrough video.
Part 2: the phone mount
The vehicle mount portion provides you with a solid anchor surface — to which you can attach any phone mount of your choosing by any means at your disposal. You want to use VHB tape to stick a phone holder to the plate? What about hot glue? Go for it.
One nice thing about providing a robust vehicle mount is that you can opt to screw your phone hold to the anchoring surface. While you can opt to screw any phone holder to the surface, you can make the most of it by looking for mounts that support an AMPS mounting pattern. To make your life easier, the ProClip mounts have the standard AMPS locations subtly marked to make lining things up easier. Because it was easier to just order it all together (talk about smart product pairing!), I opted for the MagicMount Pro (which has AMPS holes).
On the phone-side, you simply need a metal plate for the magnet to work with. It’s recommended that you adhere the metal plate to the outside of the phone/case but I found that the magnet is plenty strong — strong enough that I can sandwich the plate between the layers on my phone case and it’s still held firmly in place (and bonus: I can continue to use one metal plate from phone to phone).
Verdict?
It was not cheap - I would even say it was ridiculously expensive (yay having to pay for shipping) but having a phone mount that just works? Not having to fuss about taking corners too hard or newer (bigger) phones might cause the balance to be off etc. is so nice. Most importantly — my sacred primary air conditioning vent is no longer blocked. Should have just started with that as the selling point really.
If something ever happens to the phone-mount and it breaks, I can simply get a new (or different) one and continue to reuse the existing car-mount portion. Since the mount is generally vehicle specific (usually a model for each generation), it’s going to stay with the vehicles forever.
Bonus: magnetic charger
What’s the point of having a phone that just plops in place if I have to spend time plugging it in? (talk about first world problems…). A long time ago, I switched to using magnetic charging cables with the awesome benefit that regardless of whether the device I was using was micro-USB or USB-C, the charging cable would be the same.
For a long time, I had to choose between the convenience of magnetic cables or being able to leverage the fancy high-speed charging for my phone, but using USB-C tip adapters allowed me to convert my existing OnePlus DASH/WARP/VOOC charging cables into magnetic ones while keeping the fancy charging speed as well. In the case of the truck, I have two magnetic cables: one providing me with fancy fast charging and the other allows me to use Android Auto if I so chose.
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