TekPicks

For years, I never bought cases for any of my gadgets, but now its seems they have nearly become a mandatory item. My Kindle, iPad – although that is more for propping it up to watch videos in bed, Canon G11, MB Pro or my iPhone 4 all have some sort of protective carrying case. But this with evolution in my shopping habits, I have had to sacrifice my use of charging docks – which has long been one of my favorite accessories. The good news is there are more and more solutions out there that allows customers to use both. Many iPad case manufacturer are building in removable back pieces to accommodate a dock and SendStation has a practical if a bit overpriced dock extender for use with virtually any iPod or iPhone.

The kit comes with the actual extender, a wire support, and 3 rubber pads of varying thickness depending on how far your phone sits away from the support. As you can hopefully see from the picture above, I am using it in a Kensington iPhone Dock, in which it fits perfectly. Even with the Otterbox Defender case. In my mind, value of is function of utility so calling the Dock Extender overpriced is perhaps a bit unfair as it works almost flawlessly. The only real problems that have surfaced so far are it takes two hands to add or remove a phone – either the case tab is in the way to dock or the dock is not heavy enough to stay in place when I go to pull the phone off and the extender often pulls off the dock instead of the phone.

So while I am pretty happy with the solution, it is relatively expensive and it doesn’t work perfectly but I think the investment was worth it.

Link: SendStation Dock Extender for iPhone