I've been transitioning over to using only my cell phone for work-related calls lately. The Motorola Droid is a great phone for this. My phone time is mostly on speaker phone so I like to be able to mute the phone during these calls. This is to eliminate some background noise as well as let me do other things during the meetings (don't tell!). So I needed a stand for the phone that was stable enough to keep the phone safe and allow me to press the mute button during calls frequently without fear of knocking over the phone.
Now I could have bought a Droid-branded stand for this but this had two disadvantages:
- It cost around $30 and I've spent enough on this phone for now.
- The stands are all landscape and the Droid does not go into landscape mode when it's in a call. Thus the need for a stand that kept the phone in portrait mode.
You can see from this photo that I did several prototypes to get the right functionality and look and feel. The angle of the back is 22 degrees. I cut the slot for it with my regular table saw blade; I didn't use the dado set. I just made a couple passes until the hardboard back was snug but not too tight.
You can see from the pictures that I tried to drill a hole so that I could plug in the phone while it was in landscape mode. This was before I figured out that I had to be in portrait mode for what I was looking for. Even if I had wanted to keep the stand in landscape mode, I'd have had to cut up a USB power cable quite a bit to get it to bend enough to work so I was glad to switch to portrait mode.
The base on the final version is about 2.5" x 3.5"; it's a piece of 5/4" clear pine trim. There's a shallow dado that creates a lip that the bottom of the phone rests against. I'm not sure this is really necessary but it gives the phone a good solid feel when it's in the stand. That way, I can press buttons on the top of the screen and not feel like the bottom is going to cant up at me. The hole in the backer board is for the button on the back of my case that is used by the car mount and belt clip I have. I glued the backer board into the slot just to keep everything together. Since it's portrait orientation, the USB power port is conveniently exposed so that I can plug the phone in during long calls. (BTW, I downloaded a service that keeps the screen awake during phone calls so that I can get at the mute button quickly).
Overall, this was a very successful project. It does exactly what I need it to do; it was fun to build; and it didn't cost a dime.
