Looking forward to your review of the offivial car holder. Im very close to press 'buy' button
Here you go
It comes in 2 pieces and comes with a 12v car charger as well although the car charger is 5v/700mA (the same as the Mains AC charger).
The build quality is excellent, when attached together and mounted it won't wobble or anything like that, it stays where you put it. The only issue is it's built quite tightly and because of this it's quite a task getting the phone in and out, you can't do it with 1 hand at all and you can't mount it with a case on either.
When mounted on the windscreen it's perfect and has a decent amount of angling either side so passengers could view the screen easily too if they're using the nav or something.
The power connector is behind the mounting bracket which I like a lot, it means the cable can be routed behind the dash out of the way. There's also a 3.5mm socket for speakers/head(set)phones.
^ It can't face any lower than that.
When dash mounted (if you have one of those circular discs) then things aren't so good because the arm itself is in a fixed position so cannot be lowered or shortened so it sits quite high and because of the limited vertical movement of the head itself the phone screen is sort of looking upwards, more than I'd have wanted really. To have it facing straight you'd have to mount your disc at an angle facing forwards which isn't always possible (or suitable) on most cars.
Samsung clearly intended this to only be used on the windscreen, which I don't like doing!
Moving on to operation..... When you connect up your phone to the mount Car Mode is activated automatically and the phone launches Voice Talk and here is where some problems will be observed if you're using:
A) A custom launcher (GoLauncher EX, for example).
B) A custom lock screen (WidgetLocker, for example).
The default Car Mode application is Samsung's Vlingo integrated application, it works brilliantly most of the time but it doesn't support landscape orientation so is useless when you're in the car as you're more likely to have it in landscape for nav than you are in portrait orientation.
As for the LockScreen issue, it occasionally launches into Samsung's stock lock screen OVER WidgetLocker and this is quite annoying.
The other problem is when you come to disconnecting the mount or exiting Car Mode because when you do this the phone closes your custom launcher application so you have to press the home button again to re-launch your launcher of choice.
To combat most of these problems you can:
A) Install a custom Car Mode application from the Market such as Car Dashboard and set it as the default app to load when you connect the mount.
By doing the above I found the lockscreen issue resolves itself as well and when you disconnect the dock it returns to your custom Launcher too.
I prefer
my own DIY mount though which I've made some slight modifications to and is due another mod:
It's a bit more compact in design and takes up less space in the glove box and when in use.
