It seems like these days, everyone is trying to come up with a new idea for keeping their phones handy while not breaking the “hands-free” laws. There is a basic style associated with this – a suction cup attached to a clamp or cradle with a mounting arm. But the Steelie mounting kit comes out with a completely unique look, using a magnet for minimal cabin impact.
The mounting base of the Steelie kit is a 1-inch silver metal ball cradled in a plastic holder. The flat end of the plastic comes covered in adhesive, so it can stick anywhere on a car’s dashboard. The silver metal makes the base an odd addition to the dashboard of most cars, but its small size makes it unobtrusive.
The other part of the Steelie kit takes up even less space. It’s a magnetic grommet with an adhesive backing, intended for the back of a smartphone or a smartphone case.
This grommet, however, that sticks up about an eighth of an inch, is a little unsightly when stuck to the back of a phone.
To give you a better mental image, you need to find a flat spot on your dashboard, preferably plastic and vertical, to adhere the base. Once you have stuck the grommet to the back of your phone or its case, the magnet will make it stick to the metal base.
The advantage of this product is that you can stick the phone to the base and pull it off repeatedly, an essential quality of a good in-car phone mount. The grommet moves freely around the exposed surface of the metal ball in the base, making it easy to twist the phone for portrait or landscape viewing.
However, unlike mounts that have longer arms, the 1-inch ball of the Steelie kit means limited positioning. A phone stuck to the mount can only pivot through an arc of about 50 degrees. As such, the base pretty much has to be mounted on a vertical surface on the dashboard for the phone to be viewable by the driver.
Although this particular item has its advantages and disadvantages – like any other product on the market – it is a step in the right direction of hands-free innovation.
