Vehicle Mounting Your Smartphone

It turns out that mounting your iPhone in the car is not as easy as it might seem.  There are a lot of products on the market that claim to attach your iPhone to the windshield, vent, or cup holder in a safe and secure fashion.  The reality is that most of them are terrible products that over-promise and under-deliver.  I should know - I have tried many of them in my efforts to mount my iPhone in my Volkswagon for GPS and audio functions.

 

I have noted a couple of common faults in these iPhone car mounts.  First, they fall off the windshield, vent, etc with disturbing regularity.  This is annoying when your phone is not mounted in them as you have to reposition the mount before using it again.  It is costly when the mount fails and falls off your windshield or dash while it is holding your precious iPhone.  Imagine your phone hitting the dash, the console, and the shifter as gravity overcomes a shoddy car mount.  If you carry your phone in a good case (such as an Otterbox Defender or Griffin Survivor Case) you might escape serious damage.  If you are like most people and carry your phone in the cheapest, slimmest, and lightest case you can find and also happen to believe screen protectors to be a pain in the backside, then you will likely have a broken or damaged phone if you use one of these mounts.

  

A second fault is that many of these shoddily made car mounts will not adjust to hold an iPhone in a serious, protective case.  They require you to either not use a case at all or remove it before inserting it into the car mount.  This wouldn't be so bad if such mounts did not suffer from the first problem I mentioned above but they do.  Also, think about how many times you get in and out of the car each day.  Are you really going to go through the hassle of reinserting your phone into your case each and every time?  Probably not.

 

The third major fault is that many of these phone mounts fail to retain the precise angles needed for you to use your phone comfortably as a GPS or audio player.  Because the various swivel joints or flexible arms are so poorly made they either get knocked out of position as you hit bumps on the road or slowly lose their shape under the weight of your phone. As a result, you spend time at each traffic light readjusting your phone mount when you should be paying attention to your driving.

 

I think I have found the perfect car mount for an iPhone or other smartphone carried in a heavy duty protective case.  It is the Luxa 2 H5 Mobile Holder and it attaches to your windshield. Unlike most phone mounts, it features excellent build quality. This thing is made of cast metal and inspires confidence.  It adjusts and articulates in numerous ways to help ensure a perfect fit to your phone and windshield and it actually maintains those adjustments over time. The cradle that holds your phone adjusts to accommodate a phone encapsulated in a serious protective case such as my Griffin Survivor. Anything that makes contact with your phone is encased in a soft rubber material to ensure a secure grip. The suction cup that secures the mount to the windshield is among the best I've seen.  It will stay attached to your windshield until you decide to take it down.  Potholes and speed bumps don't seem to knock the Luxa 2 Mobile Holder out of position.  I rarely have to fiddle with it once it is attached to the windshield.  I stick it on my windshield, plug the power adapter into my phone, and place my phone in the cradle. After that it is GPS or audio nirvana.

  

The Luxa 2 H5 Mobile Holder is not cheap.  I will set you back $49.99 plus shipping from their website.  However, it is a small price to pay compared to not using that cool phone you spent a small fortune on for fear of damaging it or compared to the cost of replacing your phone when the bargain basement mount your purchased fails and sends your smartphone flying around the car. Spending hundreds of dollars on a smartphone plus thousands on a cellular service contract for it and then trusting it to a $15 piece of plastic doesn't make much sense. With the Luxa 2 H5 Mobile Holder in your car you can actually use your amazing smartphone for all those nifty things you bought it for while keeping it safe and secure. Just make sure you don't let the phone that is within easy reach distract you from piloting your vehicle.

 

 

Update on Monday, July 11, 2011 at 11:37PM by John Bletsch

Posted some pictures of the Luxa 2 Car Mount with my iPhone inserted.  

Music Discovery

Sometimes you discover great music when you least expect it. I was reviewing the tech news last night when I came across the promo video that Twitter created to introduce their new photo sharing feature. Brett Dennen's song "Sydney (I'll Come Running)" is the music track for the video and it immediately stuck in my head. Within a few minutes I bought two of his excellent albums from iTunes. Sometimes you go looking for great music and sometimes it finds you. I'm sure my wife will understand that when she sees the credit card bill.

Listening to Podcasts is Better with Instacast

I have enjoyed listening to podcasts for a long time now. They are a great way to obtain in depth information on special topics and keep up with news while performing other tasks like washing the dishes, cooking meals, and driving in the car. Each year more and more podcasts have emerged that have drawn my interest. Their production values have improved and the quality of the information that they present has also improved. But one constant has been the difficulty in actually getting podcasts onto the devices I have with me every day so that I can listen to them. Shawn Blanc details the travails of this process in a blog post back in March. He sums it up well so I won't repeat what he has already covered so well.

After reading Shawn's post I downloaded Instacast (http://vemedio.com/products/instacast) onto my iPhone and it quickly became one of the most used apps on my phone. Instacast now permeates my daily routine. Morning, afternoon, and evening I find myself using Instacast. I use my iPhone as my alarm clock and before I leave the bed I have checked school lunch menus and the weather (more on that in another post). As I head down the hall toward the kitchen to make breakfast for my family I open Instacast and it automatically checks for new podcasts in my subscription list. If there are new ones available they download directly to my iPhone as I fire up the coffee maker and warm the range top. This is a huge change from the old morning routine of waking my Macbook Pro, opening iTunes and syncing new podcasts to my iPhone. By the time the coffee is brewing I am listening to the new podcasts that Instacast has downloaded for me. Having something interesting to listen to really helps me move through the preparation of breakfast and the packing of lunches. Plus it helps to wake up my brain so that I am alert when the family comes to the table.

After breakfast, I head out the door to take my boys to school. I mount my iPhone in the car and continue listening to podcasts as I drive my three sons to their respective schools. Each son is in a different school so I do lot of driving in the morning and I have lot of time to listen to podcasts. Instacast helps make at time productive.

As I move through my day, Instacast checks for newly updated podcasts whenever I open the app and notifies me if updates are available. From there I can then download them on the go - over wifi or 3G - and the app will notify me when finished. Before Instacast - if a new podcast became available during the day I wouldn't learn about it unless I was at my Mac or saw a reference to it in my Twitter stream. On the off chance that I would learn that a podcast had been updated I could only download it on the go by one of two tedious methods: 1) opening the iTunes store, manually searching for it and selecting it for download or 2) by selecting "get more episodes" from the iPod app which took me to the iTunes app where I could search for the episode in question and download it. This often prevented me from keeping up to date with the various podcasts that I follow because, as any regular listener of podcasts knows, they are released throughout the day and not just in the morning. The nature of podcast release schedules and the cumbersome way the native iPhone apps handle this type of media made it too hard to stay current with podcasts.

I could go on but I think you get the idea. Instacast has me listening to more of the podcasts I love. It does this in clean, Apple-like interface. If you love listening to podcasts it is well worth the few bucks it costs on the App Store.

Now they just need to come out with the iPad version that syncs subscriptions and listening state.

Update on Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 12:47PM by John Bletsch

Instacast just received some significant updates with version 1.3.  The developer details them here.  An already great app gets better and better.