Car holder for N900

For a couple of weeks, I've been using a Brodit car holder for my N900. It was quite an expensive investment: 59€ for the N900 holder which includes a charger (29€ without the charger) plus 21€ for the required car adapter.

But you get what you pay for. First of all, the N900 holder is manufactured very precisely; the N900 glides in and out very smoothly. Charging is done via an integrated Micro-USB plug. Apart from the nice crafting, the guys at Brodit really have invested some thinking into how the holder might be useful, and so it has two other very nice features: First, it can be rotated so that you can choose between portrait and landscape orientation while driving. Second, it allows to unfold the N900 so that you can use the hardware keyboard while the N900 is still in place within the holder. I really like that, since the Nokia Maps application with its crappy non-standard user interface does not allow to use a software keyboard.

Apart from the N900 part, the car part also is worth mentioning: Brodit has a nice system where you combine an adaptor for a specific mobile phone with an adaptor for a specific car. And in my case, I could choose between four or five different car adapters for my car (a Volkswagen Golf) that would allow to attach the N900 at various different places within my car. The only thing that Brodit's system is lacking would be a quick-change system that would allow to quickly exchange the N900 holder by another phone holder (e.g., an N95 holder for my girlfriend's mobile phone when she wants to drive my car). So all in all, Brodit seem to manufacture thousands of different phone adapters (mind you: they even support the N900...) and thousands of different car adapters, so you probably can pretty sure to find a suitable combination for your own car and phone[s].

The manufacturer's website is a brodit.se; I bought my adapter at the German brodit-shop.de (delivery was quick and flawless).