We’re big fans of Amazon’s new Echo Show 10, with its screen that automatically rotates to face you at all times, making it incredibly easy to use, whether you’re following a recipe while in the kitchen, watching a show while exercising in the living room, or videoconferencing at the spare bedroom you turned into a home office. It’s an incredibly clever feature that’s made that screen so much more convenient to use. As such, we won’t be surprised to see more devices integrate that down the line. If you’re an iPhone user, you don’t have to wait long, either, as the Belkin Magnetic Phone Mount with Face Tracking does just that.
An iPhone stand with an auto-swiveling mechanism, the device can rotate its head clockwise and counter-clockwise to make sure any phone mounted on its dock is always facing you. Whether you’re following workout videos on Facebook, shooting a clip for your Instagram Stories, or just running playlists on YouTube while you clean up around the room, this thing makes sure you’re always in front of the screen, regardless of how much you move around.
The Belkin Magnetic Phone Mount with Face Tracking measures 8.3 x 3.7 inches (height x diameter), with the upper half able to rotate a full 360-degrees in either direction, so it can follow you around like one of those motorized auto-follow camera motion tools, albeit in a single axis. It has a magnetic dock, so you simply snap your iPhone 12 into place with no need to mess with clamps or clips, with the auto-follow system working whether you mount your phone in landscape or portrait mode. Oh yeah, it uses the MagSafe connection on the new generation of iPhones for that magnetic connection, so only those who have upgraded to the recent models will get to use it.
You need to run the companion app, by the way, as it handles the face recognition, apart from communicating to the device which direction to turn at any time. The app has a direct link to a variety of social media platforms, allowing you to use it to create videos and stream content for Instagram, TikTok, and whatever other platform you spend most of your mobile time on. Do note, the app is not compatible with video meeting platforms (not for now, but we’re hoping that will change), so you can’t quite use it to follow you around when videoconferencing in Zoom, Skype, or Google Meet.
The Belkin Magnetic Phone Mount with Face Tracking only has one axis of movement – it rotates horizontally, so it’s quite limited in what it can do. You can, however, manually tilt the mount between -15 to 30 degrees, so there’s some ability to customize it to your preferred position. The bad news? It uses three AA batteries to power that rotating motor, so you’ll probably have to keep feeding it a fresh batch, considering how much power that motor likely consumes.
The Belkin Magnetic Phone Mount with Face Tracking is available now, priced at $64.99.