Well, I got my car dock in today.

…

Sigh.

I'm considering returning it. If it weren't for the spring contact charging and the automatic car mode, I'd definitely be returning it.

First, the good stuff:

• The spring contact charging is still the way to go, and no third party dock, car or desktop, offers it.
• The dock actually has a speaker built into it that's a good bit louder than the one built into the phone, which is handy.
• The power input to the dock is on the base, which keeps cord from floating away from the dash too badly.
• It has a reasonably sized volume control on the dock itself.
• It's quite sturdy.

Now, the bad:

• It's suction-cup mount only. It is, given, a good suction cup, with an interesting mounting mechanism, but I had bought a mount for my car that I could screw into. Now I've just had to adhere the stupid suction cup disk to that mount.
• The retention mechanism is just a plastic clip that functions merely by the fact that plastic is bendy. Also, since there is a seam on the phone that the clip passes over, it does not insert easily, at least not while feeling you're not going to scratch the bejeezus out of it. I end up having to use two hands.
• The power jack on the dock is USB, which means that the 12V to 5V adapter is in the cigarette lighter adapter, which means that:
  1. The adapter is one of those 5 inch long monstrosities, and
  2. It makes it that much more difficult to wire permanently
• When making a phone call while the phone is in the dock, it doesn't automatically default to using the dock as a speakerphone. WTF, Google? At least that's a fixable issue.
• There is no visual feedback for the dock's volume control. I had assumed that it was controlling the phone's volume, but I guess it's really just controlling its own internal amplifier. (Actually, this might not be true; it might just be that it keeps forgetting to use the dock's speaker altogether.)
• There's no audio output or line to connect to the empeg's muting input

Now, the absolutely miserable:

• You cannot make the dock point in any arbitrary direction.
  
  The base of the dock is a shallow cone with a ball and socket joint at the tip. The ball is connected to a rod about two inches long, with a ball and socket joint into the phone holder itself. Seems reasonable, right?
  • The rod that comes out of the base can only be angled between about 20° and about 45° off of the cone's axis. Yeah, you read that right. The rod cannot protrude directly out of the base; it has to be at an angle, and a very limited span of angles at that.
  • The rod is able to point in different directions, obviously. Not 360°, though; what are you, nuts? In fact, it's not even close. It's more like 240°. That's not a big deal, though, right? You can just turn the whole base itself. Yep, unless you have an interest in the power cord protruding in a particular direction. The jack is on the base itself, remember?
  • The ball-and-socket joint on the phone holder angles between about 45° and -10°, which is reasonable, except that the angling is controlled by a slot in a rotating ring that the angling is only directly towards or away rom the dock. You can angle it from side to side slightly, but no more than maybe 5° in either direction. (I really need terminology for a conic coordinate system.)
  • And the holder can rotate, but again, limitedly. Its rotation is controlled by a ring, and it only rotates about 300°.
• All of this adds up to the fact that I basically can't get the phone to point at my face when mounted in the car. I can get it really close, but the cord is pointing off in a weird direction, and there's no play left at all.
  
  I recognize that if you're going to run power lines through the base itself, there have to be limitations on movement; you can't allow it to spin around a hundred times until the internal contacts snap off. But this seems beyond overly limited.

Again, sigh.

Honestly, I really want to disassemble it, throw away the mount and the rod, and just hang onto the holder itself, which I could then mount to my car mount with a much shallower and more useful tilt/rotation device. But I can't figure out how to do that yet.