Nokia E90 In the car - Cradle Issues

Because the Nokia E90 has built in GPS and navigation is much more user friendly in "open" mode, I was ideally looking for a cradle that allowed the phone to be used open or closed.

Sadly, such cradles don't seem to exist - but even once you settle for closed mode there isn't an equivalent of the excellent Nokia MBC-13L I used to use with my E70.

I'm a big fan of Brodit products and the "Proclip" is a "first fit" as soon as I have a new car. However, their cradles for the E90 didn't look quite "right" to me (open or closed) so I sourced the Herbert Richter cradle from Expansys.

This does allow you to open the E90 - but only to 90 degrees which means it won't suit navigation in open mode. However, it's a good cradle and when combined with a Brodit "tilt/swivel" mount and the aforementioned Proclip it provides an ideal mount in my Mazda 2 which is the car I use for business. I was pleased to note that it uses the now quite common clip system to fit the cradle to the mount rather than screws. It's a pity that it's a completely passive mount but since I've also given up the search for a wired boom mike for handsfree use and settled on a bluetooth visor handsfree unit at least it's only the 12v power lead I need to plug in each time.

My inital experiences with navigation on the E90 prove that it is perfectly possible to navigate on the small external screen so I'll settle for that at the moment. I know that I do want to use the E90 in open mode for navigation eventually - but I'll do that by sitting the phone on an anti-slip mat in the top glovebox of the Mazda 2 (where the lid acts as a sunshade) - but before I start to do that, I need to find a neat way of getting the 12v power into that top glovebox. That's a Navman B10 external bluetooth receiver sitting just behind the E90. I'll report on that later - but it was certainly a wise buy despite the internal GPS of the E90.