My Nexus One Car Dock came in last week, and I’ve forced myself to use it over the last few days. Unfortunately, the experience surrounding the dock isn’t good.

What I expected from the car dock:

• To hold and charge my phone
• To make and receive phone calls
• To act as a navigation device
• To play music on my car stereo

To Hold And Charge My Phone

More often then not, your phone is an after thought to driving. Your phone lives in your pocket or purse, and there it remains until it is required. Mounting your phone to the dock often happens after you’re already driving, and you suddenly need directions, or want to listen to music, or make a call. The ability to easily mount the phone to the dock is essential. Google simply was unable to get it right. The main problem is with the clip system that holds the phone in the dock.

When you try and put the phone into the dock, the clip gets caught on the seam between the battery cover and the phone casing. The first few days of use, no amount of reasonable pressure could be applied to clip the phone in using one hand. Mounting the phone was a two hand job. It took me a few days to figure out out how to hold the phone to the mount, while simultaneously pushing on the clip.

Two handed mounting of a phone to a car dock is simply unacceptable (you’re driving remember). The ability to mount the phone with one hand is a learned process. This issue detracts from the initial experience with the dock, making it feel clumsy.

To Make And Receive Phone Calls

Sending and receiving calls while driving is risky business. Distracted driving accidents are on the rise, and many states are passing laws for banning hand held cell phone calls. In order for this car dock to succeed, it should make the process of making and receiving call easier. Again, I simply didn’t experience it.

Mainly, the speakers on the car dock are simply not able to produce audio loud enough to hear. I talked with my mom for over an hour while on the road last Friday. Over that time, I continuously fidgeted with the sound volume and positioning of the dock, but could never achieve the voice clarity I expected. The voice seemed to fade in and out of clarity, and couldn’t compete with the road noise. This problem is due to how volume works when mounted on the dock.

There are two things that are controlling volume; there’s the phone volume, and the device volume. The phone volume decides how loud it’s going to push out the sound to the device. The device volume is how loud your device is going to interpret the sound it’s being pushed. So, if you’re call volume (or navigation voice) isn’t set to max before mounting the phone, the dock won’t play louder, even if you turn your device to max. You have to unmount the phone from the dock in order to increase volume, since the dock obscures the Nexus One’s volume rocker, then remount the phone.

The docks speakers themselves, are simply inadequate. Because they face away from the driver, the sound has to reflect off your windshield and come back to you. Even at full power volume, on the phone and dock, I simply couldn’t clearly hear my calls over the sound of the road. What Google could have done is make the dock speakers full volume, left the Nexus One volume rocker open, and provided a stereo jack to send sound to your car’s speakers.

One last peeve is the “slide to answer” feature of the Nexus One. While the phone is docked, it becomes difficult to accurately slide your thumb vertically across the screen. My right hand thumb keeps wanting to go up, and to the right. This continuously makes me drop the button. I find myself watching the device, instead of the road, so that I accurately complete this gesture. A large and in charge dedicated answer button on the dock would have been a welcome addition.

To Act As A Navigation Device

One of the popular features of the Nexus One is it’s out-of-the-box ability to be used as a turn-by-turn navigation device. Google marketed the dock as a way to enhance this feature, and it’s clear that they felt this was the dock’s main purpose (however short sighted). I’m sorry to say that the dock does nothing to enhance this experience.

To start, the dock does not allow the holder to be infinitely rotated to the left or right. The cords running up through the inside of the mount, delivering power from the base, would eventually break if they allowed a full 360 degree turn. This creates an portrait/landscape issue when the phone is mounted on your dashboard. Right rotation is prevented by the stopper. So, rather than a simply 90 degree turn to the right, a full 270 degree turn to the left is required. Flipping between landscape and portrait views is cumbersome, and unforgiving. A different positioning of the stopper would have solved this.

Second, navigating to places with the dock is actually harder to do while docked. One of the great features of the Nexus One Navigator was the ability to create destination shortcuts on my home screen. All I had to do is tap the icon, and up launches the navigator and routes me to where I want to go. The dock buries my shortcuts behind another layer, the car dock home screen. Some customization, like favorites, to the car dock home screen is need.

Last, like the in call volume issues I described earlier, Google’s navigator suffers from the same volume issues as in call volume while docked. It still stands that obstructing the volume rocker, and not providing a stereo connection was a mistake.

To Play Music Over My Car Stereo

I commute a distance from home to work, my ability to play music, podcasts, and audiobooks while I drive is important to me. It’s clear that playing music while the phone is docked was never thought of by Google as a use case. Shocking!

What I expected was for the dock to have a 3.5 stereo jack, and to pass music audio to it via the Bluetooth Advanced Audio Device Protocol (A2DP). A reasonable expectation since that’s how they did it with the Desktop Dock. They don’t. If fact, it almost appears like they made no effort at all to think about the audio experience of the Nexus One while docked.

What you have to do instead, is insert your car’s auxiliary audio cable into the 3.5 stereo jack on the Nexus One phone itself. While this will send music to your car’s stereo, you can’t control the volume, since the volume rocker is covered up (as I stated earlier). Also, since the sound is coming in as analog, instead of digitally via Bluetooth, you get a whine and ticking noise from your car’s alternator as it charges your phone. Had they provided the stereo jack on the dock itself, it’s conceivable they could have added in some hardware to properly dampen the feedback, and provided a superior sound.

Last, there is no shortcut in the Car Dock Home Screen to the audio player. A media button would have been nice. Sometime to easily bring you to the music player, or Listen, or Pandora.

In Conclusion

Google’s Nexus One Car Dock only provided me with a kludgy and frustrating experience. Other than it’s ability to hold the device in a visible position, it doesn’t offer a single enhancement to the phone, and only serves to hinder it’s use. Even a few hours of use case testing would have discovered most of these issues. Chalk it up to more Developer Underpants from Google.

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