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MOBILE EXTRAS
INTRO
Pamper your portable, hug your handset and
mollycoddle your mobile with this month’s roundup of essential extras. Rick
Maybury has the details...
COPY
HAMA HANDLEBAR HOLDER £40
Here’s something that will give the Royal
Society for the Prevention of Accidents kittens; a mobile phone mounting
bracket for bicycles and motorcycles! The prospect of thousands of wobbly
cyclists -- motorised or otherwise -- attempting to use their mobile phones
whilst weaving in and out of traffic is too horrible to contemplate, but it’s
such a great idea we thought we’d tell you all about it anyway.
It comes from Hama, who have combined a
handlebar mounting bracket with one of their Mobilsafe holders. These holders
cover virtually every phone ever made, so there should be no problems finding
one to fit your handset. The mounting bracket is fairly easy to fit, and there’s
enough leeway in the adjustment to accommodate the largest and smallest
diameter handlebars.
The first step is to wrap the steel mounting
band around the handlebar and thread it through a slot in the two-part bracket
moulding (we’re telling you this because the instructions are in German...).
Then, with the hex key supplied, tighten the two screws until it firmly grips
the handlebar. Next, screw the adjustable mounting head to the bracket,
remembering to fit the red quick-release/locking clip in between. The base
plate slides in and out of a slot in the mounting bracket, and the sleeved
Mobilsafe holder attaches to the base plate. This phone (in its holder), can be
released by pressing a button on the side of the base plate. So far so good?
Actually it’s all quite straightforward,
though we have to say it’s somewhat over-engineered. For example, when you
remove the phone from the handlebar bracket you have to take the base plate and
Mobilsafe holder with you, otherwise they’ll be pinched. They both add
considerably to the bulk of the phone -- together they’re almost 3-inches thick
-- and it will put some funny-looking bulges in your tight cycling shorts. It would
have been much better to do away with the thick and largely superfluous base
plate, and just fit the holder to the mounting bracket instead.
Nevertheless the quality of manufacture is
very good, and once fitted, the mounting bracket would be almost impossible for
a casual thief to pinch. It provides a safe and secure platform for a phone; our
only reservation is that it will encourage a few nut-cases to try and use their
phones whilst on the move. It’s dangerous enough out there already, with all
those four-wheeled lunatics trying to steer, change gear and hold their phones
at the same time...
THE FACTS
Typical Price £24.99 (mounting kit), £14.99 (Mobilsafe adaptor)
Features phone
mounting bracket for bicycles and motor cycles, mopeds etc. Detachable ‘Mobilsafe’
adaptor/holder
To fit most
types of two-wheeled machine and mobile phones
Contact Hama,
telephone (01256) 708110
WHAT CELLPHONE VERDICT 90%
KONDOR SUEDE CASE £30
It’s barely a year since we ran Britain’s
first ever authoritative, in-depth survey on cellphone cases and pouches (we
really must try and get out more often...). Back then we bemoaned the fact that
they were mostly boring little black bags, now look at them! Since then we’ve
seen coloured leather cases, cases made of rubber and plastic, hard cases, soft
cases, big ones, small ones some as big as your hat... Now, here’s got a range
of coloured suede cases from Kondor. The options are cherry-red, dark green,
ivory, navy-blue and of course tan, to match your Hush-Puppies.
Suede is very tactile, soft and it smells
nice, but is it the right material for a rough-tough cellphone case? The suede on these cases has been backed
with a nylon material, that gives it as much strength as leather, in any case
the areas and edges that are prone to abrasion are well protected by dark-coloured
piping. Kondor have cases designed to fit most popular makes and model of
phone; they all have elasticated sides, to accommodate phones with larger
heavy-duty batteries and a Velcro-fasted top flap, to stop the handset falling
out. On the back there’s a covered steel belt clip and detachable wrist strap.
The stitching -- in a contrasting thread -- is neat and tidy, with no loose
ends. Microphone, earphone, ringer and accessory socket holes were all in the
right places. The transparent front panels are made of a thickish, heavy-grade
plastic and when new there’s not a lot of give. On some keyboards, where the
buttons are very close together, some care may be needed to avoid activating
adjacent keys.
They’re well designed and finished, the
quality is good. Kondor are particularly proud of the fact that they use a
high-grade Italian suede, with full colour penetration. (Apparently the colouring
doesn’t go as deep on lesser suedes; you learn something every day...). Suede
is a most agreeable material, and it looks good on a cellphone. Maybe it’s not
an everyday sort of case; suede scuffs easily and the lighters colours will
mark, but if you’re looking for something different -- maybe for that special
occasion -- or a case to co-ordinate with your desert-boots then check these
out.
THE FACTS
Typical Price £29.50
Features coloured
suede cases. available in dark green tan, ivory, cherry red and navy blue. Belt
clip and detachable wrist strap, Velcro fastening for top flap.
To fit most
popular makes and models
Contact Kondor,
telephone 01425 276644
WHAT CELLPHONE VERDICT 82%
GRM HIGH CAPACITY BATTERY £30
Yes, it’s a cellphone battery, and no, it
doesn’t do anything terribly interesting or unusual, but it is very reasonably
priced, and not too bulky. It’s a high capacity pack for Motorola Micro TACs
and Flips, rated at 1700mA/h and selling for under £30. Furthermore, it’s no fatter or heavier than
many 1200mA/h packs. We ran it through our regular battery performance checks.
The first couple of cycles were a little disappointing but after a deep
discharge it performed reasonably well, giving 6 hours on a high-demand cycle (equivalent
to using the phone for four five-minute calls every hour) and 10 hours on the
low demand cycle (two five minute calls an hour). Incidentally, don’t confuse
these figures with normal operational running times, they’re benchmark tests we’ve
devised to assess battery capacity. In the real world those kind of performance
figures would mean a whole day’s heavy usage, with capacity to spare. All in
all it’s worth considering
THE FACTS
Typical Price £29.95
Features it’s
cheap!
To fit Micro
TAC & Flip phones
Contact GRM,
telephone (01253) 773177
WHAT CELLPHONE VERDICT 82%
AICO UNIVERSAL SHOULDER HOLSTER, £30
Shoulder holsters would probably be a lot
more popular, were it not for the ribald comments they seem to elicit. ‘Oi
James Bond, show us yer weapon’, is one of the funnier ripostes... In fact they’re
eminently practical, keeping your phone safe and warm, and ready for action,
though some of the bolder designs are quite obviously meant to be a fashion
statement. Now Aico have come up with a shoulder holster that combines
practicality and utility with a more conservative image.
The phone pouch is stitched to the back of a zippered
wallet, that has a couple of pockets and loops for pens and things. The pouch
has elasticated sides and is big enough for most small to medium-sized handsets.
It’s held in place by a couple of security straps, fastened together by Velcro
pads. In fact it’s not too dissimilar to a wallet/holster we saw a few months
back, even the price, at £30 is the same, but there are differences, including the
snazzy elasticated straps, which actually look like one half of a pair of
braces. The holster has two fiendishly tight trouser grippers, one attached to
the bottom of the wallet; the other one is on the end of a Y-shaped harness. The
straps are a reasonable length and our 6-foot plus holster-tester had no
difficulty with this design (others have been rather tight). It is very
discrete, the straps can be worn so that the holster remains completely out of sight, under a jacket,
providing you can resist the urge to do 007 impressions... It’s well made, the price is okay and one
size fits all. We rather like it!
THE FACTS
Typical Price £29.95
Features shoulder
holster with zippered wallet, credit card pockets and pen holder. Velcro safety
strap, snazzy straps
To fit most popular small-medium sized
phones models
Contact Aico
International, telephone (01635) 49797
WHAT CELLPHONE VERDICT 92%
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Ó R. Maybury 1996 0105
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