A while back I modded my OnePlus 5 for wireless charging, so this time I went ahead and did the in-car setup to match. Right now the only trustworthy car wireless charger you can actually buy online is Philips. I know Philips is a company that slaps its name on just about anything, but they seem to have done this one properly.

I’ve bought a bunch of cheap car mounts before, and they all died on me… So after a friend’s recommendation, I figured I’d buy something a bit nicer. He suggested Logitech’s IS40. The IS40 looks pretty good, but it still uses the same magnetic approach I’d tried before, so you need the metal plate. Fortunately I mostly use it with a Nexus 5X, so a metal plate is fine, whatever. As for magnets messing with phones — the Pixel C and the Apple iPad line all have magnets built in and nothing goes wrong, and Logitech’s manual says it’s fine too, so I’ll take their word for it.

Bought a Nexus 5X to use as a car navigation unit. Plugged it into the car charger’s USB port and… there’s the problem. I’m not even asking for “charging rapidly,” but you’ve decided to be “charging slowly”… Thinking it over, it’s simple enough. The car charger I had was a gift. Figured I’d buy a proper one. Since the fast charging supported by the Nexus 6P / Nexus 5X / Pixel C is the 5V / 3A standard and not Qualcomm’s, there’s currently no car charger head that fully hits that spec, so I settled for an Anker 5V / 2.4A one.

Before this I was using a plain car mount. Nothing wrong with it, except it blocks the air vent. In summer that’s tolerable — the cold air blows on the device and cools it down. In winter it’s a problem: the phone is already warm, and blowing more hot air on it makes it completely useless. So I started looking for a replacement, and one day on eBay I found this…

Getting a car is just the beginning… beginning of what? The beginning of buy, buy, buy! Because the Honda Vezel wasn’t easy to get and there weren’t many discounts, just being able to buy one with a small discount was already good enough. Can’t expect them to throw anything in, so I had to buy seat cushions and the rest myself. Good thing Taobao is pretty much universal—got all of that sorted fast. Of course, as a nerd who likes building computers, what I care about more is other stuff.