I’m not really sure what to make of this one though it is starting to grow on me. A Paris-based start-up company with website www.dockdock.io just sent me a sample of their new product. The slogan on their website is “Make Your Tablet Great Again!”.
What you get for €28 is essentially 4 magnets that hold your tablet to your fridge door, along with a magnetic adaptor and 3 metre charging lead for your tablet with a LED light at the end.
The tablet end of the lead is micro-USB – I’d have thought offering USB-C as an option might’ve made sense.
With the package you also get various clips and a companion Android App (that’s a link) which they say turns your fridge into a Smart Fridge using your tablet. Well, there it is, you have all the links above to progress this if you wish.
You do of course need your own laptop with power supply as neither these nor the fridge are included in the deal.
I’m guessing if you were thinking of mounting your old tablet on the fridge, this is an easy option and the website has lots of detail. Possibly in this case the best way to demo Dock Dock! is with a short video on my YouTube channel… https://youtu.be/vdcXCadTNtQ
Some time later, that’s not a bad home for the tablet and easily removed… next job is to change the single power socket for the fridge into a dual so my tablet charger gets a new home down the side of the fridge. As good a place as any.
Meanwhile here’s the DockDock! App on Playstore…
And finally, all wired up on my desktop with App showing the time, security off – convenient!
if only this trick would work on standard android tablet and not only on amazon fire ones, you could have a BIG amazon echo show for free… https://www.cnet.com/how-to/build-your-own-echo-show-on-the-cheap/
I can vouch that this process works very well. I picked up a latest version refurbished HD10 6 weeks ago which is as new for under £90 from Amazon – pair a speaker and use any old stand and you have a great Show platform for movies, youtube, cameras etc. Great addition to the kitchen – might get another for the bedroom if only I can find somewhere to move other Echo’s to. I already have a Dot in the car which hotspots to my phone and connects to car speakers. It is remarkably useful for all sorts of voice controlled content and even alexa to alexa calls and messages although it is heavy on data.
Ok Steve – you have my interest – never thought of using the DOT in the car….. heavy on data is ok. Tell me more…..
if your car has an aux in port, or a bluetooth connection, you can go for the cheaper Echo INPUT (no embedded audio)… because the Echo AUTO is only on invitation right now…
It’s a while since I installed this so apologies if I have forgotten anything. It was relatively simple to achieve although highlighting to an iPhone was tricky in that it wouldn’t remember the pairing info but android was straightforward as long as you remembered to select ‘use this connection as a hotspot’ when pairing with the device in the Alexa app. I velcro’d the dot in the footwell near my knee so I can easily mute her when necessary. Other than that i hooked it up to my car audio and use it mostly for audible, Spotify and podcast content. As it obviously has no GPS, location based services are limited. I did setup a skill to pre-record directions and then read them out on request but I haven’t used it for a while and need to dig out the details and they may have been superseded by new skills. The data issue is mainly due to the way it buffers – if you skip tracks on a playlist after a few seconds then you find you have still downloaded the whole song and then if you do something else the buffer is lost and has to be reloaded when you continue. I used a spare Dot version 1 so there may be differences with later versions . Only other issue is it does take a minute or two when you get in the car for the hotspot pairing to happen also I make sure my Dot switches off when the car is off to stop it ‘re-attaching to the house wi-fi. This was setup 12-18 months ago so may be not the state of the art today.
Indeed, well I already left my tablet on the fridge as a result of researching for the DockDock! blog entry. Echo show on top would be REALLY good. Keep digging…
Hi !
I’m Clotilde from DockDock! Our companion app is not only for Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, it’s also available on the Play Store 🙂
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.explolab.dock&hl=en
Yes, I’m using the App on a generic tablet.