Boxwave Nexus One Cradle With Spare Battery Charger
As you might have noticed, I picked up a Nexus One by Google to replace my aging iPhone 3G. I also grabbed a spare battery from google (At $25 for an oem battery, it’s a steal), but the only way to charge the battery was in the phone itself. It was annoying to have to charge your battery, then shut the phone down, remove the case, and swap the dead battery in to charge it.
Google offers a dock, but it doesn’t charge a spare battery, so that does nothing for me. I eventually found this dock on amazon, which includes a space to charge your spare battery and your phone at the same time, so I had to jump on it.
(Image from Boxwave’s Site, since I expertly forgot my camera. I’ll replace it with my own soon)
First the good:
The quality seems solid. It’s nothing spectacular, but it’s not bad.
The plastic supports the phone so there’s no tension on the USB connector. Seems obvious, but a lot of older cradle designs put lots of tension on the connector.
It charges a battery too, duh.
It comes with a wall adapter, so you can charge either via a computer’s USB port or a wall outlet.
It has an indicator light to let you know when your spare battery is charged.
When connected to a computer, you can sync your phone from the cradle, add files via USB, use the SDK for ADB or fastboot (Even *I* just said “What a fucking nerd!”), etc.
And now the bad:
It charges the phone via the USB port, not the docking pins on the bottom of the phone, like the factory cradle does. This means that while a factory cradle will put the phone in “Docked” mode, and let you use it as a nightstand clock, this just acts as if the phone is plugged into a USB cable, which is basically what is going on.
If both your battery and phone are down, it takes a long time to charge both via USB. Not really the fault of the dock, just something to consider.
I use the screebl app to turn my phone off when not in use, and this dock holds it so upright, it will keep the display awake unless I manually hit the screen lock button. This is both is a pro and a con, really.
Overall, I’m happy with the purchase. I wish Google would make an OEM dock that charges a second battery, but for now, this is the best I’ve found.
Rating: 
