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Apple's iPhone 12 made waves with the addition of MagSafe, kicking off the beginning of a whole new ecosystem of accessories. While the charging capabilities are proprietary to Apple's own product line, there's still quite a bit that can be done with the magnetic mounting system. If you happen to be walking around with a Samsung Galaxy S21 while also eyeing one of the new MagSafe mounts for your car or desk (or a tripod), Moment has a case that will bring the two together — and it happens to be on sale for the next week.
I am a very, very big fan of Peak Design's products. I use and abuse an Everyday Backpack, Sling, and Travel Tripod, and I couldn't imagine covering events for our site without them — at least, back when we had tech events. As a borderline fanboy, I was pretty excited to test out the company's upcoming suite of magnetically mounted mobile accessories. It's a system that has promise, but some of the pre-production hardware we got to check out could use a little more work.
Wireless charging is one of the few benefits of having a glass-backed phone: it doesn't work through metal, but it does through glass. That limitation in materials may be concerning for folks that want to use steel plates for magnetic mounts, but in our own testing, you can actually squeak by with both so long as you put the plate in the right spot.[EMBED_TWITTER]https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/1187766729910341633[/EMBED_TWITTER]AP's own Artem Russakovskii was able to get the magnetic mounting plate (a Spigen Kuel) set in a position on both the Pixel 4 XL and smaller Pixel 4 where the phone retained its ability to charge wirelessly. Best of all, it worked without any increase in temperature, as you might potentially expect (though YMMV).
On most phones that feature wireless charging, you typically need to give up that convenience when installing a magnetic plate for phone mounts — or place the mount in a location where it works poorly to keep it. In our testing, though, that isn't the case when it comes to the Galaxy S10+. The phone is able to work with a magnetic mount quite far up the back, with no loss in wireless charging functionality.
Car phone mounts can be a real pain to use. Most mounts on the market use some sort of clamping mechanism to secure your phone. While a clamp can effectively hold your device while driving, it is not a very elegant solution. Access to buttons is often blocked by the arms of the clamps, phones can fall out during sudden stops, changing from landscape to portrait can be a chore, and mounting the phone is often a two-handed operation.SCOSCHE, a car and phone accessory manufacturer, believes that magnets are the answer to all these annoyances. They have been making magnetic mounts for a long time and just debuted their new line of magnetic mounts, the MagicMount Pro series. The new mounts feature magnets that are 30% stronger than their previous models and interchangeable face plate frames that you can swap to match your car's interior.