I designed a Dieter Rams-inspired iPhone dock
arslan.io
arslan.io
The design and high quality materials were worth it to me for the same reasons you wanted this design — it is functional art and doesn’t look out of place next to my other quality items I see and use daily.
I could see paying $120 for this dock. I bet this is the kind of thing that would succeed on Kickstarter. Sure, I could print and assemble it myself but that would cost me more than $120 in parts and labor.
What about cases on your phone? I assume you need to remove it first?
> Apple fixes or replaces it for free
Where? In the US they charge $29 and up for repair with AppleCare+. $29 for the screen, $29 more if you damage the glass on the back too. $99 if you damage the camera or anything else that requires replacing the phone altogether.
Building your own, idk, mechanical keyboard? Hackerish thing to do, sure. But buying someone else's cool design is not against "the ethos", that's a silly thing to say. Supporting artisans in their craft is Good, actually, I don't see anything about this design which make it different that way.
HN revolves around YComb and finding ideas that make great products. Someone has come up with a brilliant solution and someone else is saying they want to buy it. HN isn’t about “hacker” purity, it’s about thinking through cool ideas and maybe finding a startup along the way.
If you go that route, you can use my referral code REFOUSPW7TK for 10% off. Totally optional.
You can order it in fdm or sls relatively cheap, just do a search and chuck the model at one or a few of em.
Question: Most docks have ample space around the phone to grip it and remove it from the dock easily. Your design encases the phone on every side. How do you get the phone out in the morning?
There are two holes on both sides (for both left- and right-handed people). All you do is push slightly, and it comes out.
You're the third person asking this, so I'll add a section about it to the blog post. Thank you again.
My experience has been that a great deal of sanding and other tool use can be needed to get to smooth results.
Did you go through a finishing process after printing to get to the smooth results you show here?
Many modern printers also give similar results, but may require a bit of tuning. Also it's as much about the settings in your slicer software, and most current ones have evolved to have great defaults and are easily tweaked.
The top SEO’d buyers guide websites are pretty useless in my experience.
That said, having owned a dozen different printers for my own business’s prototyping work, the Bambu labs are truly fantastic. I retired 3 ultimaker S7s for 2 X1 Carbons and haven’t looked back. The Bambu labs legitimately print 3-4x faster and have as good if not better surface finish. AMS system is ingenious. Only thing I did was x-y squareness/skew compensation so both printers make the same sized parts (the printers aren’t perfectly square from the factory). There are guides on how to use M1005 gcode command.
If your hobby is 3D printing, get a Bambu. If it's 3D printers, get anything else.
If you're working with more exotic or engineering materials, it can still require a bit of work to dial in. But the most common like PLA, ABS, PETG will print without issue.
Bambu does all that and more for less money. Hard to beat.
The Prusa XL may still be worth it if you need that sort of thing.
On the other hand, continuing the bed slinger line let Prusa provide an upgrade path for existing printers.
- print quality and speed is similar (new MK4S seems to be a bit better)
- Bambu's design life is much shorter (Prusas are fully repairable with parts stocked in the online shop, and every new version release includes upgrade kits for old models)
- the amount of effort/babysitting is similar
- reliability seems higher on Prusa's side (no wonder, given that they print parts of the printer on the printers themselves on industrial scale)
Also, if this matters to you, Bambu behaviour (like patenting opensource designs they didn't invent [1] and hostile competitive intelligence [2]) seems quite problematic.
[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5134/8/6/141
[2]: https://twitter.com/josefprusa/status/1706713274455081120
Got an A1 mini in the recent sale and it's been so refreshing being able to just focus on what I actually want to do, which is printing stuff.
That's what sold me on getting my Bambu, and it's totally true. No need to spend hours carefully aligning and calibrating things.
The acetone (vapour) approach only works on ABS and is pretty nasty. For PLA your best bet is sanding. You could add some putty to make it a bit easier and get better results. You will then also need to paint it. All in all if the print quality is good enough best stick with that.
We don't sand any PLA, anymore. If we need to control the surface texture, it's largely a function of the qualities of the filament and print speed.
I'm mentioning it because we were surprised how easily our molds separated when we moved to Bambu and didn't understand why. It turned out that the combination of the layer height and high print speed that gave the prints their smooth, matte finish with standard PLA also made them functionally non-stick.
We also discovered they're also at least tough enough for a car to drive over, which may have just been because of the thickness. I also sometimes print nylon and polycarbonate automotive parts for a mechanic which seem to have excellent rigidity and durability.
As FDM printing evolves the number of use cases it cannot solve seems to be shrinking. Probably we need to get into physics requirements to cover the requirements that FDM does not solve these days. Which is great, it makes general plastics manufacturing super accessible to the masses when we can arrive at this. I wish there was a general FAQ thing available people would be able to use to determine what manufacturing process would be necessary at the product planning phase. Because I feel like if people knew that they could just 3D print plastics at scale that a lot more people would be willing to innovate in the hardware space, which is a space well known as being difficult to enter and fraught with all sorts of monetary and regulatory land mines.
We do most of our bulk purchasing through MatterHackers, but I buy my own filament through the Bambu store.
If you’re using a color that already has a decent amount of yellow in it or don’t mind the yellowing polyurethane and spar-urethane are also decent finishing options. They won’t work on colors like white though, obviously. Even grey is probably going to see a little too much yellowing from those.
Tbf medium-large sized prints you can see it's printed up real close but from arm's length at 0.12 height you can't really tell.
Only thing is terrible overhangs/bridges...I need to pick up an AMS already!
XTC is a good solution for some use cases, and quite bad for others, as outlined above. For the use case in the OP, probably it would be quite nice. That use case is one that is hobbyist level of output in terms of number of units generated but also one where aesthetics are quite important if not fundamental to the overall design. For this kind of use case XTC is a good fit.
The one other thing to consider, if you design to use stuff like XTC and even the urethanes I mention above, is that obviously it takes up some amount of space. So you have to factor that into the design. Probably what I would do is take my boundaries from the original design and increase the tolerance by maybe 1mm or so for the extra space the finishing agent will take up. Because I highly suspect that if you applied XTC to the dock in the OP that the phone would no longer fit after that due to the tight tolerances in the design without that adjustment.
Also, MEK, Methyl Ethyl Ketone, apparently smooths PLA out quite well too, but if you can print in ABS I would already be doing that for finished products anywho.
MEK is incredibly strong and useful, but it is also nasty stuff[0].
Please read the MSDS[1] and handle with appropriate PPE.
[0] https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...
[1] https://www.fishersci.com/store/msds?partNumber=M2094&produc...
In practice, experience says doing this (in a robust way) is a lot harder than it sounds. ;)
Thanks, very nice design and write-up.
I’ll share the source once it’s a bit less painful to look at (right now everything is a bunch of copy-pasted spaghetti code :')
I think the always on screen is a 14+ feature.
Onshape: It's public domain on Hobbyist plan, so anything I create has to be by default Public. The next plan they have is $1500 yearl
Fusion: This is the most recommended one, however it's macOS and Windows only. Their Hobbyist plan is pretty generous, but the UI is very slow on macOS and it doesn't have an iPad app.
For me, the iPad Pro is a huge enabler. I don't want to sit down in front of my MacBook because I already work the whole day. Second, with the Apple Pencil it's so much easier and intuitive compared to anything else.
The only ceveat with Shapr3D is the cost. I paid for the yearly subscription, which was around $299. And it's the cheapest of all of them btw.
Currently all your corners (excepting the ones that use Apple's supplied bezier points) appear to be tangent but not curvature continuous. As someone with the utmost respect for the learning amateur I would like to kindly inform you that having G1 corners from just hitting "fillet" is the #1 way for design cognoscenti to ascertain that a model was built by an engineer. Alternatively you could try to mimic or offset the G2 curves Apple already paid a bazillion dollars to fine tune.**
* this particular industrial designer x mechanical engineer does not use Shapr but I do see G2 / curvature continuous fillet tools exist via their support page.
** this designer also thinks Apple's and Dieter's corners are too squashed square and has been building devices with slightly sharper and more accelerated corner curvature as the world's natural bends are parabolic or catenary. So roll your own and find your aesthetic voice!*
It's possible the Shapr rendering engine is not very subtle, or perhaps the G2 math is accurate in a strict sense but the output is not very differentiated from G1. It's mathematically possible for there to be a continual change in local radius, i.e. be curvature continuous, while still having local changes be sufficiently aggressive that it visually appears discontinuous at a human scale. Each CAD kernel seems to make these things in its own way, hence different industrial design studios will strongly prefer the use of certain 3D CAD programs to make their final master models (e.g. Alias). Personally I drive CREO as for ages most manufacturers overseas used pirated copies of Pro/E or CREO and thus I could send them "native" surfaces. In that program my preferred curvature continuous coefficient range was 0.52-0.57. I don't have Shapr access handy so messing around with the coefficients and finding a result that you like is outside my domain -- and perhaps you already did!
Still, all that is on the modeling side, but the best way to actually check the visual smoothness of your corners is to use analysis tools like curvature combs to check how aggressively the model is making transitions. It doesn't fundamentally matter if you use the built-in automatic tools or manually adjust b-splines in your NURBS: the smoother your combs change the smoother your corners will look. [I checked the support page for Shapr to see if it supports curvature comb analysis and saw nothing about it, so you may be out of luck on that front until future updates.] Absent that you have to just spin the model in CAD and see how smoothly the highlights roll around and hope the built-in rendering engine is doing its job well.
One last item of subjective crit in sculpting smooth models: when applying a fillet to an edge that turns a corner, such as your interior pocket, you'll have a less visually cramped and abrupt appearance if you use a fillet chord (edge radius) that's nontrivially smaller than the chord length of the turn it has to make (corner radius). Maximized fillets that come to hard corners and make a full spherical bubble, e.g. your initial models shown in gray, generally look less natural than those that allow the fillet to turn the corner. This lets the highlight work its way around in a racetrack form instead of getting "stuck" in the extremes.
Nice work dude, I wouldn't comment if it didn't seem like you're dedicated to making continual improvement and learning new tricks.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gwXJsWHupg
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/3hewrd/has_anyo...
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/ResinCasting/comments/9v03mp/fillin...
It’s a nice way to stop these types of 3D prints from sliding around in surfaces, without having to resort to weights or lead shot, which it way more painful to integrate that you would expect.
https://sewelldirect.com/products/airstick-microsuction-tape
Asking because I'm interested in getting one, but I know very little about them and have no idea what to research to help me decide.
Shapr3D can import and export pretty usable STEP files.
It has inspired me to finally try OpenSCAD, and I’ve started to put together a parametric version of this: https://u.ale.sh/braunscadv1.png
Not really ready for primetime yet, just wanted to share :-)
EDIT: a quick question: would you be open to sharing your version under a more permissive license? I’d love to reuse some details if you don’t mind, but I’m not sure if I can do that with the current terms.
And Pinterest is great for inspiration.
What case did you design it for use with?
When I saw the title on this page, I was hoping to see a version that was inspired by Apple’s iSight camera (with the perforated aluminum)
None of this is intended to take away from your work - it’s just so dang inspiring!
He's got a very nice approachable style (almost the Bob Ross of woodworking?) and has some great beginner videos. He also sells a course with plans for gradually increasingly challenging projects. No affiliation, just watched a lot of his videos when I was first getting started with woodworking.
There are also (as you'd expect) thousands of other Youtubers doing woodwork, too. Steve's just a great starting place.
I will suggest a few things. Follow up each of these points with more research if you can.
Spend as little money as possible and prove to yourself you’ll actually like it. Then buy only the good tools you actually need for the project at hand. I have tools I bought that remain unused and I regret spending the money. Its not the tool’s fault but me going in a different direction.
It doesn’t matter what species of wood your first projects use. Prefer wood with straight grain and you should be fine for your first half dozen projects.
Read widely or watch many YouTube videos. There’s a lot of space for ideas, from carving spoons to making stick chairs to making furniture of any style. Note what inspires you but be aware the path to making what you like may take awhile.
First project: make a cutting board (only one piece! Learn how to make it look great and learn a finish) Second project: make a simple box (learn how to make things square, learn some simple joinery)
Safety first! I put this last so it’ll be the first thing you remember. There are so many ways to ruin your health, from breathing sawdust to using toxic finishes. Hand tools are generally better for your lungs than power tools. Soap or wax finishes are healthy and easy to apply. Just about everything else is toxic and you must protect yourself accordingly. Invest in safety glasses, masks and gloves. And a first aid kit.
Woodworking is an extremely rewarding pastime and I hope you get hooked. Best of luck!
While conventional tools are nice and necessary, having access to a gantry CNC machine for cutting wood is a HUGE thing.
A CNC makes many projects a single step. Anything having to do with cutting plywood to non-rectangular shape or stencils or carving letters or ... yeah, do it on the CNC.
And, even if the project isn't a single step, a CNC can compress a bunch of steps and make the project way easier. And even the canonical "cutting board" may require the CNC for a flattening pass (edge grain through a planer has issues).
Start with small projects and hand tools. People have been building beautiful things with a small variety hand tools for centuries and the lack of noise alone changes the entire experience.
I spent a couple years buying books and watching YT, especially Paul Sellers[0] before building anything at all.
The reality is that fine woodworking is a craft and takes years to master (I certainly have not mastered it), but one can create objects pretty quickly that feel wonderful to hold.
When you do get down to buying machines, a decent track saw can be much more versatile (and space efficient) than a table saw for a first purchase. FWIW, I have both and use the track saw 2-3 times more frequently because it's easier (though much slower) to safely and accurately break down large sheet stock. It's also the only Festool product I own.
Another personal anecdote is having a US software engineer salary provides for a tool purchase not being a big deal. There are tons of people that have expensive hobbies like photography, guns, drones, 3D printers, etc. so to me I'd rather buy a $600 planer than have to hand plane boards to make a desktop. I did discover a Milwaukee track saw recently which hands down I should have gotten years ago. So I will agree that should be the first purchase for someone starting... you can likely use that for almost all use beginner use cases that might call for table or miter saws.
These are good counterpoints people should hear.
I definitely use both kinds of tools.
Part of my position is that I was surprised at how efficient and accurate I'm able to be with a Dozuki hand-saw and chisels for dovetail joints.
I'd say hand-tools are more about the process and machine tools are more about the outcome.
I'd encourage people to choose a direction based on their interest, rather than budget (which I didn't say before).
>I'm still astonished by what you can do with CAD software and a 3D printer at home.
I really want to get into 3D printing, for neat hacks like this, but also because I've been fiddling with arduino and similar and find it difficult to really find good parts to mount them on, attach servos too and so on. Would be nice to just be able to print something that I know will fit even just for prototyping.
Anyone have a good suggestion for a 3D printer that is good quality, will last a while, and beginner friendly?
The alternative choice would be the Prusa Mini, although the BambuLab has higher quality and more features than the Prusa.
They forked a slicer, which wasn't against the license but not terribly nice either.
The big thing now is the patent lawsuit with Stratasys
None of these things matter for the average user. For the average user the Bambu products are the ones to buy. Easy button for 3d printing.
Everything seems perfectly in order with both the Linux-based firmware on the X1C[0] and their slicer[1] which is a fork of Prusaslicer.
[0] https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/knowledge-sharing/open-source-s...
Maybe last year people were saying that Bambu intercepts your models, that it's not private.
As I google, they say that your camera feed also goes to the public internet.
I suppose they could bang a hole out thru your router & host something on the printer, then have your app sync your ip when on the wifi with the printer, but then if your ip changes when out & about you'll lose access unless you've set something up for it.
Gotta remember that Bambu is all about ease of use. It does have a LAN only mode, but I do agree that they should support some sort of plugin system for the printers and just refuse to support unless you're experiencing an issue while using 0 modifications/plugins.
But after looking into it all the bad stuff doesn't really apply - they forked Prusa slicer which Prusa fans got mad at (ofc) but Prusa forked from Slic3r, sooooo nothing wrong there at all.
Bambu use an nfc tag in their filaments, not to lock people in as I (and others) thought, but to auto select the right profile when it's in their AMS (multi colour) system; it's still completely possible to use other brands and their slicer provides a couple non-bambu brand-specific profiles already, along with "generic" profiles/material that work pretty damn well by default.
I picked up an A1 mini during their recent sale and unfortunately after using it...I don't think I'll ever use my Ender 5 Plus ever again (poor thing)...when I have enough space I'll just buy an X1C.
They've made it just so...effortless. You know what, it even takes even less effort than a fucking 2d printer these days (HP/Brother et al).
Although primarily I'd really like to be able to print full colour 3d busts, I understand that the point of hueforge is that it's 2d because it works like a picture box/shadow box with the layers.
Doing 3d is just a regular multi-colour print I suppose but the only annoying thing is that small regions of colour just require too much flushing. :/
There's just something about the bas relief output that's satisfying in a way that a 2d printer doesn't hit.
With the Mini, I was hesitant to try things because I was afraid the prints would fail and I’d spend forever calibrating things. With the X1C, I can crank out prototype iterations as fast as I can design them.
With my good old Ender 3, almost every print required tinkering with settings, otherwise print quality was bad or prints straight up failed. It was great for learning about 3d printing but with the A1 I can just print everything in much better quality without worrying about any settings.
It was around CA$300 when I bought it a year ago. I'm considering getting a second one.
It does require some tinkering and few minor upgrades (nylock mod for bed levelling, oldham couplers for Z-wobble) to get good results as well as plenty of profile tuning, though now I’m there it’s been rock-solid.
The exception might be if 3d printing itself is your hobby and you enjoy tinkering endlessly, upgrading parts, tramming, setting esteps, etc...
Bambu Lab is extremely popular right now, and looks to be very easy to use.
If you are tryna get a 3d printer on a budget, any of the Creality Enders, like the Ender 3 or the CR-6 MAX are good starting points within the ~$200 range.
source: https://us.store.bambulab.com/products/a1?variant=4158335519...
Without that, the mini is £169 and the A1 is £289 as you say.
Edit: downvoted for liking a printer
If you wanted something more production/out of the box ready, you can certainly find it. But it doesn’t have to be a big initial investment. You can start small and then upgrade as you go.
I'm shocked by how well the prints come out and how little fiddling it requires.
I've set it up with Klipper now with an old mini PC I had around and a Playstation 3 Eye camera, feels nice to put old hardware to use and controlling / monitoring prints remotely is neat.
Be warned though, the printing part is just a tiny step in the rabbit hole. Soon enough you'll be lamenting the state of CAD, yearning for class A surfacing in your projects, and trying to decide between diving into Rhino/Grasshopper or mastering SOLIDWORKS.
1. I would like to see just a solid block on the front, redesign it so when I stick the phone to the MagSafe, because it will hold, the phone completes the design rather than fitting it into the hollowed out piece. The phone should be able to just be placed on the front and let the MagSafe hold it in place. I should be able to just grab my phone and go, not have to poke it from the back.
2. The MagSafe charger used is fine for proof of concept but I would like to see the MagSafe part better integrated into the stand like it is with the TwelveSouth HiRise 3 (not the deluxe)
1. In the blog post I actually worked on that for a few days. But I didn't like it as much I liked this one.
2. Unfortunately the default Apple MagSafe charger that I can use as a customer isn't easily bendable like that. TwelveSouth and other companies use custom parts, so it's possible to integrate them in a better way.
The appear of the design is that you just slot in a USB MagSafe charger. There’s no custom electronics involved at all.
Or if you want to get really fancy, the MagSafe magnet arrangement is well documented, and you can easily buy adhesive magnets that arrive in the correct pattern and orientation, which would allow you to embed the magnets completely within the print, and later add a standard Qi charger to provide power.
I’ve personally torn down Qi chargers and embedded them in furniture to create completely integrated, and “invisible” wireless chargers. On the whole it’s pretty easy todo, only major downside is higher power losses because there’s more space between the charging coil and the phone, and your coil alignment will be less accurate than Apple. But it’s still a completely functional charger.
Spectical sounds like an improvement over skeptical since it implies that you keep looking and don't just dismiss. If this was a typo we should consider it a coinage and run with it.
> it implies that you keep looking
As in “On first glance I was spectical the chair could hold enough weight, but the more I looked the more I noticed little details that improved its strength”.
I love it! I seriously may use it.
Last year I tried to design my own magsafe stand but it was proving to be too complicated to meet my criteria of looking good and be stable (the 15 Pro Max is big and heavy) and I didn't want to go down the route of making many prototypes/iterations so I ended up just printing a design someone else made [1] and it's been solid.
But I can see the advantages in making the phone still be the alarm clock, or else you'd run into problems w/ having an alarm on both the phone and on the clock. Plus it would be nice for the display to change if e.g. someone is calling me in the middle of the night. I can see why the design is the way it is, since presumably none of that would be possible if the dock is just a wireless charging cradle.
It reminds me of the cool ways the wireless charging dock for the HP Touchpad let you turn the tablet into an ambient clock or a digital photo frame, all the way back in 2011.
There's actually a ton of similar models out there, including this one with a built-in Apple Watch charger (and no it's not commercial-compatible)
I use the similarity between the work of Dieter Rams and Apple's Jonathan Ives to illustrate the difference between homage, appropriation and 'ripping off'. I am cagey about where I stand on Ives but the students come to their own opinions.
Also, has anyone found a nice solution for a "Standby Mode" Equivalent for Android? I tried a Daydream-Screensaver, but with that my phone get really hot and it also was very bright.
I would like to see a parametric version for older iPhones, though (I have a 15 Pro, but there are others in the house...)
Noone praises cheaply-made products for being economical with materials, we call them cheap and nasty, it's the same with 3d prints.
I've had an idea for a dock that turns your smartphone into a landline of sorts. Plugs into an actual corded phone base and only rings the physical landline phone.
Look forward to expanding my maker from dev to real gadget!
Well, don't do that. DN-40 is a trademark that doesn't belong to you.
Thanks for sharing it.
I have no idea if there might be trademark/copyright issues, if you tried marketing it, though.
For example, I believe that Harley-Davidson has trademarked their exhaust sound, and I think that Google, Ferrari and McLaren have trademarked colors.
These kind of designs are essential for 3D printing to graduate from printing baby yodas only. Also, the high-quality photography and documentation helps a lot to go for the 3D print over temu.
You can also use "adaptive layer height" in the slicer settings to greatly reduce it.
Printing ABS is more challenging though and the fumes tend to smell.
and having to do a naruto hand gesture to get the phone out is a lot harder than pressing down on the top
Were you inspired by this guy who also made the same clock?
Also, nice design, but the word “inspired” is doing some heavy lifting.
Because there is a tray, you don't need any mechanism to remove it. It's just your fingers and hands.
On an unrelated note, what happened to significantly decreasing your contributions to X?
https://arslan.io/2024/04/07/my-feelings-about-x-formerly-tw...
Here's his Dieter Rams iPhone dock too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3nWw8qSYgk
(his production quality is unreal)
I'm looking for the second one, the leather valet tray. Appreciate any information.
For those who haven't tried using standby mode as a bedside clock, I recommend it. Started using it maybe a year or so ago after buying a prebuilt magsafe stand, and the OLED panels that have been in most iPhones for several years now are very well suited to the use case — the panels can get quite dim (latest models go down to 1 nit!), there's few pixels lit up in the first place, and what light does get emitted is a sleep-friendly red. It's like the old red 7-segment display alarm clocks but even better since it's not as bright and turns off when no motion is detected.
Going back in time though, I should have paid up for something with auto-leveling from the start. That is the most important feature. After using the $100 Ender V3 Pro for several years I'm probably going to make the jump to something from Bambu soon.
I also ended up adding the AMS, which is super handy.
Over time my conclusion with 3D printers is that the capital cost of the printer is (within reason) largely irrelevant. Unless you're on an extremely tight budget and are going to print in just one color, the cost of filament pretty quickly dominates. Especially with the inexpensive printers. $20-30 a pop adds up in a hurry.
* Braun, Designed to Keep (Phaidon) * Dieter Rams (Phaidon) * Bauhaus (Taschen) * Dieter Rams, So wenig wie möglich (it's in German, but there is also an Englisch version, from Sophie Lovell)
Also TIL: Vimeo has a lending period thing now. Will watch it on the weekend.
Amazon does have it on DVD or BluRay but not on Prime. And for anybody reading this: There's naughty stuff down the search results for me, so watch out... ;-)
Or multiple people had the same idea..
Sibling claims no.
I came here to see if anyone is selling them. I don’t have a printer.
How else would you describe the situation?
the watch certainly matches with the Dieter Rams aesthetic of the phone dock!
1) Seeing the time without any phone present.
2) An independent time display also would be a tiny load, so the trickle vampire energy isn't being wasted.
3)Removing the only moving part also simplifies using the phone immediately. Do you want to be fumbling with an eject spring latch when someone is having a heart attack?
4)Compatibility: Now it works for Android, iPhone, Blackberry, or whatever other devices already use wireless charging.
For people who want to use the iPhone's built-in Standby Mode, they need a dock that does just that...