Snapmount 2.0: Take your Magsafe and stick it where the sun don’t shine
The Snapmount 2.0 is a magnetic mounting disk with a unique reusable adhesive surface that can be used again and again with the occasional maintenance of wiping off debris with a wet cloth.
The adhesive does not leave any residue, and does not appear to lose strength until you’ve collected a decent amount of debris (dust.) While the manufacturer of the adhesive is not mentioned, I suspect this stickiness is what I saw at CES several years ago where they had not figured out an upper limit of how long it lasted. I’m at somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 placements of this device and one cleaning and it still adheres as though new.
The obvious use cases for this are stick it in the kitchen and mount your phone to follow a recipe, slap somewhere to watch Netflix, glue to a dashboard to use for navigation, place it on an exterior door to test for an article again and again.
Over the course of many, many tests the Snapmount rarely felt less adhered, and that was corrected by washing it off. Lot of exterior door dust came with it when I moved it, but then again I wouldn’t advise mounting this on a dusty door unless you’re working on a review.
The magnets are strong, allow you to rotate smoothly, and as a disk that works with magsafe or magnetic cases this did almost everything I wanted. Almost.
Let’s talk about a Snapmount problem/fix
Problem: removing The Snapmount from a surface is on par with removing a well-stuck 3M pad.
Now, the Snapmount I received was in a package with two items containing a bag with the Snapmount, and a Snap 4 Luxe. There exists the possibility that there was documentation that came with this, however my wife stole the Snap 4 Luxe for her phone without asking, and there’s nothing to indicate there are more instructions for the Snapmount other than those provided here.
At the time of writing that link indicates that it’s powerful enough of an adhesive to pull paint off of drywall (and how to prep/counter that) but nothing about how to easily remove it. The Snapmount is thin and sleek, and does not jut very far from the surface you’ve stuck it to. I required a butter knife to remove it from one location, and popping it off others usually required some tool other than my nails.
It does the sticking job too well. Not that I want it to do worse, but there’s no handle to pull it off the wall and it needs something to help you disconnect it.
I would suggest a design change to include a pull-off tab so that you can more easily de-mount it by removing from a set point, but in the meantime a good work around is to put a small ribbon or string behind it to aid in pulling it off the wall. You can also wrap a piece of string around it when you want to pull it off the surface, although when I did that it went flying and landed on the hardwood floor and had to be re-removed.
Overall
Pretty great for what it is, which is a disk that you can stick most places and slap a phone with a magnetic case on. The magnets were strong enough I did not worry, and the reusable adhesive never was in doubt. Addition of a removal method would be useful, but as noted placing a ribbon worked well to obtain an easy removal.
You can grab the Snapmount on the manufacturer’s website.
