I bought it thinking that it would be a good place to charge my Droid, but when I hooked it up I discovered that my phone automatically recognizes that it's in a multimedia station. I can completely configure it specifically for this device, and when I plug it in it changes into a true multimedia station. The clock comes up by default and I have programmable shortcut buttons to quickly access my stock prices, pod casts and stuff like that.
The only problem I had with it is that it only allows you to have about 6 shortcuts (or less if you put a widget on it). Motorola HD Dock for DROID X and Droid X2 (Motorola Retail Packaging)
This thing is really cool, and overall I think it's worth having. As soon as my phone touches it, it recognizes that it's in a multimedia station and switched to a clock. From there you can set it up as a digital picture frame or hook it to your TV. What I don't like about it, it that it is VERY difficult to get into the thing. It took me some practice to get the trick to it. I always worry that I'm going to break it or wear out the prongs.. BAD! It's also not so easy to get out of the thing, which wouldn't be so bad if I could just pick up a call from the docking station. When the phone rings, I can pick it up and put it on speaker phone, but the person on the other line has a hard time hearing me.. But, I like the other features enough to make it worth it..
Love this dock. Since I cancelled my home phone service, this allows me to always have my Droid charged and ready to answer any incoming calls. Also love the way I can play music through it and having it interupt for the phone call. The only drawback is that the silicone sleeve which I ordered won't let the Droid sit in the cradle. So I have to keep putting the skin on/off all of the time. But it's a minor inconvience since the dock is so great. And price was excellent too.
I bought the Motorola Multimedia Station for Motorola Droid X for two reasons:
* To allow easy overnight charging in a secure location (you don't want to see the clutter on my nightstand!)
* Easy access to a bedside clock, alarm and display of current weather
While it technically does all of the above, in each case there are annoying caveats.
In terms of the dock allow easy overnight charging in a secure location:
On the plus side, the dock has a rubber base, so it doesn't slide around and get knocked off of the nightstand.
Another plus is that the included charger is a high speed 850 mA charger (like the one that came with the the Droid X). Many micro-USB chargers (including most from Motorola) are only 450 or 500 mA, which take longer to charge the phone.
But getting the Droid X into the dock is a production so annoying that it almost isn't worth using!
No amount of positioning, aligning, wiggling or other tricks (as suggested in another review, to insert it connector side first w/ a slight tilt) will allow me to readily mate the Droid X with the dock. Sometimes I luck out after several tries, but often I have to pick up the dock and fiddle with both it and the phone to get them to dock.
My only hope is that over time the connectors will shift a bit and adjust from being docked, making docking easier.
In terms of its use as a bedside clock, alarm and current weather display:
First, once the Droid X is finally docked and the display has shifted to its special docked format, the weather display applet wouldn't load, just displaying an "error loading widget" in its place. After searching the net, I found that this common problem can often be solved if you put the weather widget in the trashcan and recreate it. After doing so, the weather widget worked OK.
Next, the display just can't dim enough to be bedside friendly. Using the onscreen dimmer, they lower the backlight to its lowest level (which is still *way* to bright in a dark bedroom) and then darken the onscreen graphics to make the display appear dimmer.
The problem is that a *lot* of light from the backlight is still leaking through, even though they have made the display look "dim" by using dark graphics in a failed attempt to mask the backlight.
It would have been nice if the dimmer had a third setting, turning the display off entirely until the screen was touched. But no such luck, and so far I haven't found an app to fix this.
As a fallback, you can use the power button to totally kill the display, but then you have to find a (small) button in the dark to turn it back on.
The final nail in the coffin is that when docked, none of the non-alarm sounds are automatically muted, meaning that incoming email, text messages or other notifications will be waking you up all night.
As to whether you want the phone ringer silenced too, that's a matter of personal preference. In my case, when I go to bed I don't want any noise until the alarm goes off in the morning, and no light shining in my face unless I've tapped the phone to see the time.
To silence the phone at night requires that you manually kill sound (easier done before docking, but possible afterward) either via the "silent mode" in sound settings, using the mute slider on the lock screen, or holding down the power button to get access to the "silent mode" option. All of these will kill notification and ringer sounds, but not media or alarm sounds. (And you don't want to kill the alarm volume if you want to be awakened in the morning!)
A problem remains even if you do manually mute the phone. If you have anything that uses the media volume setting instead of the notification volume setting when sounding an alert - as one of my apps does - the above steps to mute the phone won't help. You have to go to the sound settings and manually zero the media volume to silence these apps - and then remember to reset the media volume in the morning in addition to unmuting the phone to restore the other sounds.
One partial save here: there is an app that automates muting the phone when docked (except for media). It can even be set to only mute the docked phone between certain times.
Worse yet, if you do want the phone to ring at night while not bothering you with other sounds, you can't use the above solutions. Your only choice is to go into the sound settings and manually lower the notification and media volumes, while leaving ringtone and alarm volumes set normally. And then you have to remember to reverse this in the morning!
So between difficulty physically docking the Droid X to the dock and not turning the Droid X into a convenient and useful bedside device, I have to seriously lower my rating. I'd have given it a rating lower than a 3 other than the fact that many of my problems are related to how the phone acts when docked, rather than with the dock itself. - Charging Cradle - Dock - Docking Station - Motorola'
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