Griffin Simplifi
Hated that the 3G iPhone didn’t come with a dock. Not a big fan of desk clutter but sync cable and leaving iPhone wherever it ends up on the desk is almost worse. I had an Apple Universal Dock for a while but never used the remote or line out thus I couldn’t justify the cost. Did a little digging and turned up this solution. It’s an SD/MMC etc card reader, iPhone/iPod dock and powered USB hub that somewhat maintains the Apple aluminum style.
It isn’t perfect but I actually like it quite a bit. First of all, in many of the reviews I read people mistakenly say it adds one USB port. It’s such simple math I don’t understand why they’re getting this wrong. It will add two USB ports to your desk. Previously I would connect a USB sync cable to my computer, using one USB port. Now I connect the Simplifi to my computer, using one USB port and can still connect two other devices to the back of it. Since I only have 3 USB ports in my MacBook Pro this is a nice benefit and part of the reason why I bought it.
Another one of the complaints were the horribly bright blue LED’s on the front and back. They were terrible and we’ll never know why they didn’t use white. Oh well. I cracked it open the day I got it and replaced them with white LED’s I had in my toolbox. Problem solved.
Also, though it has a rubbery base it doesn’t grip the desk as well as I would like. I put a little bit of double-stick tape underneath it to fix that. If you don’t want it to be too grippy you can stick the tape on your shirt first to dust it up a little bit.
The final complaint is that it doesn’t charge an iPhone or iPod unless it’s plugged into a computer, even though the unit has its own power. This is more complicated to fix so I just live with it. Definitely annoying though since I use a laptop and not a desktop pc.
Otherwise, I’m happy with it. It matches the look of my Cinema Display and through the use of Apple’s dock adapters supports nearly every iPod device. It can be difficult to remove SD cards once inserted into the reader (since it doesn’t have a spring mechanism) but whatever, I don’t use them that often. And at $40 it was just $10 more than the ExpressCard card reader I was about to buy for my MacBook Pro. So for a dock, 2-port USB hub and card reader it isn’t a bad value.
Here’s what it looks like after my white LED mod:
