BlackBerry Playbook Arkon Car Mount

So being a car and gadget guy I wanted to integrate my BB Playbook and phone into my Scion tC. But being that I didn't want to go over board building a bracket and fiber glassing my car I looked at other alternative. Before I settled on the parts I used I looked at a few like Pro Clip USA which make vehicle specific car mounting solutions. Ideally this is the one I was looking at 

This would have been perfect with anyone of there mounting frames but putting the cost of that clip ($30) and there cheapest cradle ($50) it would have totaled around $100. Not bad for the price but my issue is that like many Scion owner I have a modification would prevent this from being ideal. I have a Perrin short throw shifter which in 5th gear would probably end up hitting the tablet. So the other thing I had to keep in mind was that when I travel with kids in the passenger seat they might want to play a game or something to keep them busy. 

After some digging I ended up buying an Arkon TAB-FSM Seat Bolt Mount on Amazon for about $30 shipped which I got in about 2-3 days. 

When I received it the package contained the hard ware about and a 4 short tabs and 4 long tabs. Here's the bad news, using the short short tabs and trying to mount the Playbook normally will not work (is your using a bigger tablet your fine). I forgot to take pictures of it with the short tabs and Playbook but there is another way to mount it. Here are some of the picture showing the tab that come with it. All the photos were taken with my BB Curve 9360 so they might be the greatest buy at least you get the idea.

So now with that being said you have to mount the bracket horizontally with the Playbook. I used the longer tabs for this. 

The Arkon bracket is spring loaded which is why I used the longer pieces to prevent unnecessary wear on the springs. As you can see below it's almost on the edge but it work. More information on how well it hold driving is explained later. 

Now to build the assembly is pretty easy. Also note that the end that goes to the tablet has a Swivel ball connection for 360 Degree rotation with tilt for portrait or landscape viewing" 

So this end will connect to the tablet mount pretty self explanatory. 

Like I said pretty straight forward on building. Now to put into the car. I just used the passenger side seat mount bolt closest to the center console. I had my impact so 10 second later I was all done. 

So there it is. My radio unfortunately does have bluetooth but it does have have an aux out which I connected to the Playbook for Slacker radio, SMS alerts, email alerts, Navigation through longitude if bridge is connected and so on. Hopefully I can make it a little more useful later down the road. 

As for how it holds up the shaft wobbles slightly when I drove but it hold the Playbook with no issue. I'm a pretty aggressive driver and haven't really had an issue other then the shaft wobble which I'm not really going to complain considering the price. The other added benefit is when I do have a passenger they can turn the tablet to them and use it if they want to for games video or I can listen to the radio while they plug in headphones and watch youtube or whatever. 

For people with Bluetooth enabled radios playing music or what have you would be easy. For people that don't I have been looking into an alternative route that would eliminate some of the extra wires. One that I'm not sure if I'm going to wait on is the Blackberry Music Gateway which on Crackberry should be shipping in November which would allow people with non-bluetooth radio's (like myself) the ability to connect through aux in but hide all the wires. Also being that it uses the standard BB charger cord I wouldn't have to compile some thing for this. The other option I looked into is using a Belkin F8Z492-P Bluetooth Music Receiver which is available at Walmart normally 35 to 50 buck and getting a Sprint car charger with on ebay or amazon can be relatively cheap. 

Well that's it for this install project. Simple $30 and a few minutes of work time if your not doing a write up and you have a tablet to run your in car entertainment. Hope this was helpful....