Kenu Airframe - portable smartphone car mount

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2015/04/23/kenu-airframe-portable-smart.html

I’ve had one of these for about a year. It’s very well made and works great in most cars I’ve tried. Unfortunately my own car has very flimsy vent louvers and we’ve broken a couple of them. But that’s the car’s fault, not the Airframe’s.

Yes! My experience is similar: Great design, small visual footprint, works well, may not be entirely compatible with weirdo vents (Citroën, I’m looking at you).

My '85 Mercedes wagon has cruciform vent louvers that are too thick where they meet in the center to hold the phone mounts I’ve seen that purport to be designed for such vents (like the one you have pictured here appears to be), and they’re situated in round cavities so deeply inset in the dashboard as to foil any other vent-clamp style mounts I’ve tried (again, including the one pictured above). I’ve had the best success with a CD-slot mounting phone grabber, something akin to this. It works with or without the removable face-plate on my car radio, allows the phone to be rotated any which way and stay put.

Anyway, I s’pose it might be useful for the dwindling subset of people with ornery vents and CD-slots in their car radios.

I got a suction-cup mount from iOttie. The suction cup has a gel coating on it, so it conforms to and sticks to just about any dash. My car has a pretty deep grain texture, and it stuck aggressively to the surface. I put it on this winter when it was about 20deg out, and it remained stuck until I took it on a road trip in a rental this spring. I had to peel it off to get it loose.

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…wow do I feel stupid. It never occurred to me somehow that the vent mounted clip is why my phone gets so hot.

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I’ve had bad experience with vent-mounts. I’ve been though many, many phone mounts over the years. My current setup is a hybrid.

I ordered this magnetic mount on the basis of the cool tools review: http://kk.org/cooltools/archives/23232 and I love the one-handedness of it. The downside was that suction mount it came with just didn’t quite suit the dash of my Outback; however, I was able to use the long gooseneck of this http://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00I0DL2OC which I previously owned, but was unsatisfied with because the phone-grabbing part was just too difficult to operate. I was able to combine the two because both use the same ball-joint swivel part.

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