My dad had to solve a problem:
When he bought his Mercedes a few years ago, he had an original hands free system included. He picked the phone according to what was compatible with Mercedes built-in systems back then. At that time Bluetooth was apparently not a good option or maybe had trouble to ensure a clear signal. Or Mercedes was too cool for it.
Whatever the reason, I was always puzzled by why they’d design a rather clunky, cumbersome phone cradle for the space below the center arm rest. It did not take the iPhone to show how good industrial design for phones and accessories can look like, so it is hard to get why the Designers at Mercedes Benz were not able to come up with something slicker.
But hey: I might frown upon it, but in the end the cradle and the hands free system worked very well.
Time passed.
And the cell phone my dad picked back then (a Samsung GT-S3310 or something hideous like that) got old. At one time the battery had lost its capacity. My dad replaced it. Then the same thing happened again but the battery did not exist anymore and could not be replaced. It became so bad that the battery was completely drained of its capacity and even when it was sitting in the cradle in the car, it would not work for a while.
And this is the point where you’d say:
You: No problem, get another cheap phone and the world is good again.
But it’s not that easy.
The phone cradles Mercedes offers cannot be easily adapted from one phone to the next (seriously: what a shitty, customer unfriendly design is that?).
“Okay”, you say, …
You: … so you have to buy a new cradle with the new phone, right?
I’d agree with you in the normal world. In the world of a German luxury car manufacturer, however, things are not that straight forward. Mercedes apparently only offers cradles for outdated shit phones, which you cannot find in the market or, if you do, you only get with bad contracts. It makes you wonder whether there’s anyone in Leinfelden-Echterdingen with a brain. Don’t get me wrong: it makes sense to me that Mercedes cannot re-design cradles over and over again every year for the ever changing phone shapes that come out. But this is why a smart company would design a cradle system which can be easily adapted in size (say: only replace a connector and keep the cradle itself modular in size – there are lots of examples in the market for phone holders from third parties).
It’s a while ago now and things might have changed to the better in the meantime, but I was running some Google searches on this. What I found were threads in Mercedes online forums where people asked how to connect a modern phone – like an iPhone – to their hands free system because they could not figure out how. Obviously missing cradles are a problem, but the discussions also were about Bluetooth. Many got negative replies with reference to how limited the built-in system is and some were even ridiculed that they should get “a real phone” (sounds like the story of the cup holder, I suppose).
Anyway. I eventually did find a cradle that was compatible with an iPhone: namely the 4S, the only iPhone that is still officially sold by Apple (three generations back) and that got accoladed with the doubtful honor of an available phone cradle that works with a Mercedes. I shared this information with my dad and then I did not hear anything for a long time.
Till today.
Coming Monday he will have the new cradle installed in his car and then things should finally work fine again.
This was a tough one, but once more the world got a little better.
Edit April 27:
Changed the title of this entry. Originally it was “A phone cradle is like a cup holder for a German car manufacturer”. The new title was an idea of Lamia and I think it’s way better and fits great…
