Paul looks at the phone mounting options for cars, before explaining how to claim 200MB free data per month via a very special Three deal.
Paul looks at the phone mounting options for cars, before explaining how to claim 200MB free data per month via a very special Three deal
Ashort and sweet tweet from a reader asked: “What’s the best car mount for a smartphone? Thnx.” That’s one of those “How long is a piece of string” type questions. There are many different car mounts available, and what works for one person might not suit someone else. I’ve even had online arguments with friends on this very subject!
I assume that the reader who asked the question wants to use their phone as a satnav. I’d discourage any other use of a phone in a car, particularly making or taking calls. Strictly speaking, if you have the phone in a mount then phone calls are legal (at least for now), but various studies have shown that concentrating on a call increases the risk of accidents. If you need to speak to someone urgently then find a safe place and pull over.
Once a destination has been programmed in, however, satnavs are much less of a distraction – in fact, clear and accurate route instructions can reduce stress levels and increase the safety of a journey.
I’ll talk you through the various car mount options, and which are my personal favourites. But the first choice you need to make is where to physically place the car mount. For a typical setup, you’ve got three possible positions. You can attach the handset to your windscreen, or to the top surface of your dash, or else somewhere lower down on the front of the dash.
Windscreen mounts are popular, and usually use a suction mechanism to clamp them to the screen. I think they’ve evolved from the early standalone satnav mounts supplied by TomTom and others.
The pros of a windscreen mount are that the screen remains in your field of vision, so you’re more likely to be able to see any alerts, and that being next to the windscreen you’ll get the best possible GPS reception. The big problem, for me at least, is that with the phone sitting in your field of view, it’s actually obstructing your field of view.
There are legal rules about blocking part of your windscreen (they separate the screen into two zones), and there’s also MOT advice around whether any obstruction obscures the sky, bonnet or the road ahead – obviously a grey area, because we’re all different heights and have varying driving positions. Rather than bore you with the tedious legal details here, I’ll point you to a recent article in our stablemate publication, Auto Express: pcpro.link/289mount.
Whatever the legalities, if I used a windscreen-type mount then I’m terrified that a child or a bike could end up being obscured by my phone. And for that reason, I won’t use one. I simply don’t want to take that risk, however small.
Dash-top mounts are better because, unless you’re so short that you need to sit on a cushion to see over the steering wheel, the phone will only obscure your car bonnet, rather than the road or pavement. The problem is that tops of dashes come in various shapes, sizes and textures. In most classic cars, the shelf above the dashboard
is literally that – a long, flat shelf. These days they’re full of bumps and curves, and will often be made from a textured plastic, which makes it difficult to use a suction-type mount. As a result, folk end up using a mount that uses some form of adhesive (often 3M VHB tape, which is extremely sticky), which will often end up damaging the vehicle on removal.
If you do want to use a dash-top mount then I’d strongly recommend taking a look at the Montar from WinnerGear. Rather than adhesive, it has a sucker-type arrangement on the base, but the suction disc is made from a soft jelly-like material that sticks to surfaces even with very deep textures. I’ve found it locks solid onto pretty much any non-absorbent surface. The sucker feels a bit tacky, as though it has an adhesive on it, but it doesn’t; it’s just a very pliable surface. If it gets dusty or dirty, you simply rinse it under a tap.
Be gentle with the mount, though – a few people in the reviews section on Amazon have reported that the phone-clamp part has broken after a year or so. I can’t imagine how people are breaking it, because looking at my Montar (which I’ve had for a few years now), the mount feels well made. I wonder whether the broken units have been cheap knockoffs? I know that WinnerGear has had a problem with clones of some of its other products.
I don’t mind dash-top mounts, but I prefer the type that attach your phone to the front of the dashboard. There are various forms of attachment, including adhesive discs and bits of metal that you poke into gaps in the trim. However, the most popular type seem to be those that push over the vanes in the car’s air vent. They work well in most vehicles, but bear in mind that you won’t be able to adjust that particular vent.
Once you’ve chosen the style of mount, you’ll find several different methods for holding the phone in place. Some have sprung sides that grip the phone, others use a “gravity” mechanism where the weight of the phone resting on a lower arm pulls the side-arms in. And then there are magnetic mounts.
I love magnetic mounts, but they don’t suit all phones. Some require you to apply a metal disc to the back of the phone, or inside the case, which is a bit clunky. Handsets that offer Qi wireless charging will usually have the required metal bits inside, and so the disc isn’t needed.
The primary factor that determines whether or not a magnetic mount will work is the weight of the phone. Of the two phones on the desk in front of me, I know that a good-quality magnetic mount is fine with the Samsung Galaxy S8, but the S9+’s extra weight makes it unsuitable.
What I like most about magnetic mounts is that they’re unobtrusive. One of my favourites is the Spigen, which at the time of writing costs £7 on Amazon ( pcpro.link/289spi). It’s 4.5cm wide and uses strong magnets. I can use it with the Samsung S8, even with the phone in a skin-type case. Some of the competing products use ball and socket joints to allow you to angle the phone, but in my experience they just make things wobbly, plus the phone sticks out further from the dash. The Spigen is about as flush as you can get.
Beware that some of these magnetic mounts have the manufacturer’s name embossed on them (Aukey is one brand that does this, but there are others too). This means that there’s much less surface area in contact with the phone, and as a result the handset is more likely to slip when you go over a speed bump, or hit a pothole. My top tip is to look for magnetic mounts that have completely flat front surfaces.
For heavier phones such as the Samsung S9+ and the bigger iPhones, you’ll need a gravity mount. Again, most of these tend to have large ball and socket joints, which are supposed to offer a degree of adjustment but just end up making things wobbly, causing the phone to stand quite a way off the dash.
I found one from Wofalo on Amazon ( pcpro.
link/289wof) for a tenner. Although it has a ball joint, it’s quite small and made of metal rather than plastic. I even went one step further and put a ring of Sugru around the back of the mount once I’d found the ideal position, to lock the whole thing solid. It works well, but you have to be careful if you want to use it with a charger, because not all USB-C leads will fit through the hole in the middle of the bottom arm of the Wofalo.
Of course, if you have a Qi-enabled phone then you can also get Qienabled car mounts that will charge the phone as well as hold it. I’ve tried out quite of a few of them, without any great success. As with noncharging mounts, you’ll find them in gripped sides, gravity and magnetic variants. I find they tend to be quite bulky, and unlike a typical wireless charger that you’ll use at home, the car mounts tend just to have a single coil inside and so the position of the phone is critical. I’ve always given up, reverting to a simple mount and a plug-in charging lead. If any readers know of a decent car Qi mount (other than those the high-end brands are now building into their vehicles),
do let me know.
Free Three
I’ve just found a mobile phone bill from a few years ago, back when I was a bit of a BlackBerry fan. I can see that my contract included 50MB of data per month. No, that’s not a misprint. It’s 50MB, not 50GB. And you know what? I hardly ever went over it. Perhaps this is partly because BlackBerry phones of
that vintage were extremely frugal with data, but also because the mobile internet just wasn’t such a data-hungry place.
Old habits die hard, it seems, as these days I’m still pretty frugal with my mobile data. I typically use around 1.5GB per month, although it can vary. If I go on a long road trip, streaming music and maps while I’m driving, then my mobile allowance takes a massive hit. I have friends who easily plough through 20GB or even 50GB of mobile data per month. I don’t know what they’re doing – perhaps their phones are hosting spambots!
One of the perks of writing this column is that some of the networks give me freebie SIMs, but I try not to abuse those – all of my day-to-day spend is done using proper paid-for phone contracts. How else could I write here and on social media about the best deals and the worst customer service?
Back to data. Although that 50MB per month seems pitifully small these days, there are still situations where a small data allowance is all that’s needed. I’m thinking particularly about IoT and M2M (machine to machine) comms. Items such as remote building sensors, weather stations, burglar alarms, and even on-demand trackers (as opposed to those that stream continuously). All use quite low volumes of data, and it makes sense to use the cheapest possible SIM cards inside such devices.
Many system developers tend to use pay-as-you-go for such applications, where you’ll typically pay 1p per MB using the O2 or Three networks, and anything up to 10p per MB on the others. Non-bundled data is one area where the main networks can be significantly cheaper than the MVNOs running on their network. Giffgaff, for example, charges 5p per MB, which is five times the price of the underlying O2 network. Odd, isn’t it?
However, if your IoT or M2M application uses less than 200MB per month, there’s an even better option: a totally free SIM offered by the Three network. It’s one of those “not many people know about it” things, and it certainly sounds too good to be true – but it isn’t.
I’ve been using a couple of these free SIMs and they work very well. It isn’t some cut-down service – these SIMs give full 4G access and even offer free data roaming to 71 countries.
When the SIM arrives, you have to go to Three. co.uk/freedata to register this offer. It gives you the first 200MB of data, and then every month it’s topped back up to 200MB again. You don’t have to do anything at all. There are no restrictions on tethering – you can use the SIM in dongles, tablets and Mi-Fitype devices, as well as in your IoT and M2M kit.
There’s a limit of five free SIMs per account (I’m sure you’ll think of a way round this if you need more!), and the SIMs are data-only, unless you add some credit to them. You can’t send texts or make calls, but in my experience you can receive both.
What’s the catch? Surely we all know there’s no such thing as a free lunch. As far as I can tell, there’s no catch, other than the 200MB per month limit. If you can live with that then you’ve effectively got a trickle of free data forever.
If you navigate the Three website, it will tell you that to get this deal you need to buy a SIM with £10 pre-loaded. Rather than doing that, just go to three.co.uk/Free_SIM_MBB/ Order, where you can currently order the free Data Reward SIM without paying a penny. You don’t even have to pay for the postage!
I’m sure this will get shut down at some point, so please don’t nag if it’s been knocked on the head by the time you read this. Just buy the “promoted” version with 1Gb preloaded for a tenner instead at three.co.uk/datareward – it’s still a good deal, and still has the free 200MB per month on an ongoing basis.
More cheapness
Finally this month, remember about a year and a half back ( issue 271), when I wrote about various cloud-based security cameras? I enthused massively about the Nest Cam, with its superb picture quality and ability to use weak Wi-Fi signals.
Even more so, I loved the cloudbased Nest Aware recording system, which saved a constant stream of video on a 24/7 basis (most competing systems just record short clips after something triggers an event). I also liked the way that Nest (which is owned by Google) can use its remote cloud processing to analyse the incoming video stream to identify people and other things. The only fly in the ointment was the price, with £8 a month giving you ten days of recording. I complained that this level of annual running costs for a £150 camera was hard to swallow.
Well, someone was listening to my complaints – and countless others, no doubt, all saying exactly the same thing. There’s a new five-day recording option for £4 a month, or £40 a year. That’s far more affordable for many people, although it’s a shame the price of the ten-day option simply wasn’t halved.
Nest also has some new cameras since my last piece, with more local processing, but at £300+ they aren’t exactly cheap. Perhaps I’ll take a look at what they offer over the previous generation in a future column.
“Three’s free SIMs offer full 4G access and even free data roaming to 71 countries”