Hold me tender with this smartphone car kit
The iOttie Easy One Touch 2 Car Mount is quite a mouthful. It's also quite a handful when you pick it up, as it resembles some sort of unholy union between a medieval torture device and a siege engine. Don't get me wrong, the iOttie is a wonderful mount with a lot of bells, whistles, and especially a lot of moving parts. It's also sporting a budget friendly price, but do all those moving parts add up to a stand that's worthy of your dashboard or a massive mechanical migraine?
Stick around.
Construction
Now, the iOttie is bulky, to be sure, but for the most part it hides it well, especially while your phone is docked in it. Behind the spring-loaded cradle, is a telescoping handle that leads to a pivoting, sticky suction mount. However, that pivoting arm goes up and down rather than side to side, meaning you can't rotate the mount around towards the passenger seat if the person riding shotgun needs to, say, add a different destination to Google Maps or find a new playlist... or watch some Netflix while you drive her to the doctor's office. It's not a huge flaw, however, as the person riding shotgun can just as easily un-mount it, make their changes, and put it back in place due to the nature of the iOttie's spring mechanism.
The Easy One Touch 2's cradle has a rather noticeable button in the center of the backplate. When you press your phone against that button, it releases the spring-loaded arms, which hold your phone in place while you keep driving. When the arms grab your phone, two tabs behind the backplate are extended. To release the phone and reset the spring-loaded button, you squeeze the two tabs until they click, and catch your phone as it's released. Simple enough to use, and the phone only fell out once in a month's use. The bottom of the cradle has a small, sliding plastic plate for your phone to rest on when it's held upright, which you can move from one side to the other depending on where you prefer the phone to rest and where the charging cable for you particular phone needs to go.
Now, some of the adjustments to the mount are less simple. The tension knob for the extending arm isn't exactly easy to operate if the arm is in its lowest position, and the knob for the pivot, while big and easy to turn, it also somewhat clumsy, and falls out easily if you turn it too far. The tension on the pivot arm isn't so much tension as a choice between locked and loose, meaning you can't set a medium to firm tension and then pull the arm up and down out of the way as needed.
Day-to-day use
I've used the iOttie for a little over a month with my Moto X, and I have to say I like it more than the last mount that I reviewed here on Android Central, the iBolt Mini Pro, and while part of that may have to do with my Moto X upgrade made it almost too big for the iOttie, a lot more of it has to do with that drop-dead simple button to mount the phone. With the iBolt, I had to use two hand to get the phone in or out and if I was making a quick drive, say from home to work, then I'd often skip it and just stick the phone in the cup holder like normal. With the iOttie, I have been much better about pulling the phone out of my pocket and mounting it since I can do it one-handed and it only takes a second.
The iOttie has more angles and positions than the iBolt as well, but to be honest I haven't used them much yet, apart from turning the cradle sideways and mounting the phone in landscape, which is relatively easy so long as you didn't over-tighten the plastic bolt that holds the cradle onto the mounting arm. I actually prefer mounting the phone in landscape, even if I need to be a bit more careful when releasing the phone, since it isn't resting on that plastic bottom plate. Rotating between portrait and landscape is easy enough, and you can also easy tilt your screen to avoid things like glare if you happen to drive when the sun's going up or down, or if some asshole behind you has their high-beams on.
However, moving it from one vehicle to another is gonna take some elbow grease, as the suction-adhesive combination that the iOttie uses to stay securely on your dash or windscreen also makes it a major pain to move. On the other hand, you know it'll stay in place. While most people won't be transferring car mounts often, if you do, you better have an arm of iron or look for something a little less powerful.
The bottom line
If you haven't gotten yourself a car mount yet, you should really consider making the investment. A great and growing number of communities are passing legislation against holding a phone while driving, meaning that if you need to follow Google Maps, you'll either be needing a mount or looking down a lot at the phone in your cupholder — assuming your shrinking cupholders are big enough for today's growing smartphones. As a Moto X user, I can tell you that Moto Voice and all voice commands work better with the phone mounted in front of me rather than shouting it down at the console, cupholder, or worst of all, my pocket.
While the iOttie Easy One Touch 2 may seem a little daunting with its knobs, bells and whistles, it is most assuredly a mount worthy of your sweet ride, and you can pick one up from us right here.
More from ShopAndroid.com
