Rokform RokDock Stand Review
When you're talking about solid aircraft grade aluminum, there's not a whole lot to be had out there in the world of smartphone accessories – unless you're talking about Rokform, of course. This company makes a series of covers that lock into mounts, those mounts then sticking to essentially any surface so long as its flat – and they make bike mounts as well, so flatness doesn't always impede. Here with the Rokform RokDock, you've got a place to rest your phone that cannot be busted.
This dock is not made to amplify your smartphone's speakers. It does not have NFC embedded within. It's not made to connect to your machine with a keyboard, nor does it make your smartphone smell better.
Instead, this is the dock you want if you want your dock to stay put. It's the heaviest dock you'll have ever picked up – and you probably won't be picking it up often. Instead you'll open it up once, and then only to insert and adjust the cord that connects to your smartphone. Your microUSB (or whatever other kind of cord you've got) sits at the base for docking, the other end going down and out the back where it can head out to a wall port or to your PC, whatever you may need.
There's a screw-tight adjustment inside to keep the cord tight, then a rubber bit that can be placed in any of a series of notches up above to keep your smartphone in place. The whole unit is made up of of two larger interlocking pieces of solid aluminum and a few bits of rubber all held together with several screws. WHere applicable, this unit is CNC machined and hand-assembled.
While we've got the gray/orange model here, you can also pick up red/black, blue, or straight up all-black. There's also an iPhone 5 iteration of this dock that's essentially the same, that iteration coming with a series of machined holes to redirect your speaker sound. Here you'll be relying on good ol' sound bouncing off metal.
Every smartphone we've docked in this machine has fit like a charm, that including devices up to the LG Optimus G Pro in size. This dock is made specifically to hold "Galaxy" devices including the SII, SIII, and Galaxy S 4, but as you may have guessed, all you really need to be able to do is fit. This dock agrees with the full lot of RokForm v3 cases as well – it's big enough to hold the big phones and formed in such a way that it'll hold the small ones, too!
The dock itself is not cheap – ringing in at $99 USD right this minute, you'll certainly want to think about how important it is for you to be working with precision-machined metal to hold your smartphone that you likely dropped just over twice the cash on to own in the first place (on contract, even). That said, you'll never have to deal with people saying you bought a super-expensive smartphone only to put it in a shotty, low-grade dock – this the RokDock Stand certainly isn't!
