This is so close to being a good charging stand, except that the USB port is used to hold the phone in place!

Its design is quite simple, as it’s just a USB 2.0 pass-through from a micro-USB port on the back of the dock to a male micro-USB on the front.

There’s not much more to say about it in text, so check out the video to get a full look at it! And this does have the benefit of being one of my shortest videos, so you only need to invest about 2.5 minutes into it. :)

What follows is pretty much the script for the video. I mention this in case you have a sickening hatred for the medium of video, my voice, or are at work.

Perhaps like you, I bought the Outtek charging stand for my night table. I usually charge overnight, and use my phone as my alarm. A stand like this would give me a much better view of the time and snooze/cancel controls in the morning.

In the Amazon listing it looks quite sleek, and in person it doesn’t disappoint… too much. In real life it looks pretty good — though it lacks the luster of the pics in the listing, of course — but it also reminded me of one of those 1980’s picture frame stands. My parents had a bunch of them when I was a kid, and I loved them back then. But now the style seems dated. I know that comes down to my own experiences, but at any rate there you have it.

Plus it was cracked in one corner. Not a deal breaker as no one is going to see this but me and the missus.

In the box is a small manual — which is really all that’s needed because the device is so simple — and the charging stand itself in a very pleasantly textured bag.

I have a Motorola Nexus 6, which is a pretty big phone. Fortunately this stand is relatively beefy, being only a bit narrower than the phone itself. Besides the looks, I was initially attracted to this charger by the deep lip in the front that looked like it would hold my immense Nexus quite securely. And indeed there’s no way it’s going to slip up and over that lip.

I was quite pleased with the pads on the bottom of the base, too. They really grab onto the table nicely, so the unit won’t slide all over the place.

The first time I plonked the phone down in portrait orientation it started charging immediately, and all was well.

However, when I tried using the phone — just navigating around a bit — it wobbled like crazy. That’s not helped by the Nexus’s curved back and bottom obviously, but there’s very little friction between the acrylic/plastic and the phone.

In landscape orientation the phone is much more stable. In fact, I envisioned using it in landscape all the time anyway, so I don’t really mind the portrait wobble.

But the problem I have — and this will of course vary widely between models of phones — is that the Nexus 6 has a Qi coil that’s off center when oriented in landscape. It’s probably around two-thirds of the way down the phone.

To get good coupling between the coil in the phone and the one on the charger, my phone ends up having to be far left of center. This means that the phone doesn’t sit stably on the stand this way around either.

My advice is that if you plan on using your phone in landscape on any brand of these portrait style charging stands, find out where the Qi coil is on your phone and keep that in mind when selecting one.

The one in the Nexus 6 hits the mark just about dead center to the stand’s coils in portrait, though.

But enough about the bad; One very appealing thing to me about the Out-tek is the way the LED shines through on the bottom of the unit. It’s bright enough so that it looks pretty damn cool, but not so bright as to be obnoxious in a dark room.

However, sometimes my phone will start charging immediately when I stick it on there. Other times the LED blinks between green and blue, which as close as I can find from the manual means “unnormal”. And of course the phone doesn’t charge when that’s happening.

The manufacturer recommends using the charging stand with a 2A or higher rated power supply, and I tried this out on a 1.5A, a 4A and a 6A USB supply, and it was hit and miss with all of them. Sometimes it would charge, and other times it would be “un-normal”. And I have Qi charging mat at my office which works just fine, so I don’t think the problem is with the phone.

One reason I decided to buy this model was that they specifically listed the Nexus 6 as being compatible. I’m sure they did so because the Qi circuitry is indeed compatible (though it doesn’t always work), but not because it’s a good fit for the form factor. You may not have similar issues with your phone, of course, and it may work flawlessly for you; Based on other reviews it has indeed worked well for many people. So before you buy it, consider the shape of your phone and the location of its Qi coil.

And if I could request anything of the manufacturer, it would be that they make the face of the charging area out of a rubberized or otherwise high-friction material, and put a rubberized pad at the bottom for the phone to sit on. That would probably make the stand a perfect choice for a wide variety of contoured phones.

Hopefully you’ve already checked out my other video: Project Fi – From 1996 to Nexus 6. In that video I discuss Project Fi, the Nexus 6, and the cellular industry in general. It started out with an opening shot of twelve Nexus Sixes (or Nexus 72, if you prefer).

In another blog post and video I showed off my motion control slider project. I’ve been looking for excuses to use it in particularly “motion-controley” ways, and so I decided to composite a bunch of passes of the camera over my one Nexus 6 to make make many of them.

As you can see, it’s done in front of a green screen. That let me isolate the Nexus 6 in each pass, which I then layered on top of each other in Adobe After Effects. I just used a mirror effect in Adobe Premiere to create the left side of the “wall”.

I thought that this was a good use of motion control for compositing because it would have been nearly impossible (or at least very difficult) to make each of the 6 passes of the camera happen at exactly the same speed if I did it by hand.

My green screen and the holder for the phone (just a mini light stand covered in green masking tape) weren’t perfectly uniform, either in texture or lighting, so the matte came out a little rough and you can see some artifacts around the phones.

I’ll admit that I’m a lazy man, so rather than re-light and re-shoot the entire thing I used a garbage matte to get rid of the worst of it. With the footage having been sped up 3x and the white-to-normal dissolve thing, it’s not overly noticeable in the final product. (Or at least I’m hoping that you didn’t notice it.)

If you have any questions about how I put it together, or any advice for me on how to get a better result next time, please let me know in the comments!

Why Project Fi?

I’ve been a Verizon customer since back when they were called Bell Atlantic back in The Year 2000. Lately their service has been terrible in my area. When I’m lucky enough to get an LTE connection, it’s slow and high-latency.

Project Fi lets my phone choose the best of two providers for my data service: Sprint or T-Mobile. And so far, it’s just plain better.

I go on at some length about it in the video above.

The Intro

In a previous blog post and video I showed off my motion control slider project. I’ve been looking for excuses to use it in particularly “motion-controley” ways, and so I decided to composite a bunch of passes of the camera over my one Nexus 6 to make a wall of Nexus Sixes.

Please check out my new post about the intro!