PopMount 2 Flex Review

Product provided by manufacturer for the purpose of review.

Ever since I picked up my first PopSocket, I’ve been a fan of the company and the products that they make. From having a mount in my car, to an easier way to prop my phone up while watching YouTube videos, it’s been really good. As Pedro Pascale said in Wonder Woman 1984: “Life is good…but it can be better.”

That’s where the PopMount 2 Flex comes in.

I’d seen this product around on social media and occasionally in Target but was always a bit hesitant about picking it up. It’s not that I ever thought this would be a bad product, but rather that I didn’t think it would be that great. And in a lot of ways I was wrong, but little things stop it from being perfect.

What I Like

This mount is flexible. When PopSockets says you can bend it in any number of ways, they aren’t joking. The mount that I was sent is covered in tangerine rubber and it’s my understanding that the inside is a wire frame. I do find that when I bend the mount into a particular position, it stays exactly how I put it — I have no fear when it comes to that.

There are also holes on each of the feet that can be used to feed a power cable through to keep your phone charged. Admittedly, I only used this feature about twice, while playing Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time on my phone, but I appreciate that it’s there. That is, however, one of those features that’s nice to have but entirely unnecessary as there is generally plenty of room to not only get a cable to your phone, but keep the cable somewhat managed. I won’t dock it points for that, though, because if it makes one person’s life that much better, it’s more than worth it.

I also really like how easy this mount is to take with me between home and work. I simply grab it from whatever table or desk I have it set up on, bend it all the points down (so it’s almost like a miniature side table) and slip it into the headphone pouch on my backpack — I use a pair of AirPops pro and not over the ear headphones so that area has become my miscellaneous carry area.

I definitely have a few specific use cases for this mount that I have managed to easily work into my daily routine (also benefitted by the fact that I work a combination of swing and grave shifts at a resort that is currently in its slow season, pandemic not withstanding).

The first of these isn’t too crazy: listing to music.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been listening to music a lot in the app Marvis Pro. While I don’t inherently think there’s anything wrong with the stock music app on my iPhone 12 Pro, I really like the fact that there’s an option to override the screen timeout when the full sized player is open. That means that if I’m sitting at my desk doing emails or doing computer based taks and I’m listening to a random mix, I can twist my phone to landscape mode, open the full player, and see each song that comes up with a simple glance over. Sure I could just ask Siri “What song is this?” but I’d hate to annoy my coworkers that much.

The second primary use that I’ve assigned to this particular mount is a comic book reading companion. Yes… I’m going there. I read a lot of comics on the Comixology app, as well as Marvel Unlimited and DC Universe Infinite (review coming soon, I promise). Portrait panels look great in portrait, but landscape panels deserve to to be read in landscape. That’s where the PopMount 2 Flex comes in. I can open whatever book I’m in the mood to read, turn off rotation lock, and just twist my phone to adjust the orientation as needed. Could I hold my phone in my hand for this purpose? Absolutely, but I can only hold my phone for so many hours a day, sometimes I just want to be concerned with the content I’m viewing and not how my hand is cramping up from being in one of three positions for too long.

I will also say that watching movies with this mount was a very fun experience. Throughout the course of my night, I can easily transition from sitting to standing any number of times — on the really dead nights, I’ll absolutely watch a movie or binge something on Netflix.

Inspired by WandaVision, I decided to go back and rewatch Age of Ultron for the first time in a while, and this mount was a great companion for that. I was able to get a nice viewing angle when I was sitting, but also a fine adjustment to stand over the screen and look down at my movie from above.

What I Don’t Like

Like I said in the introduction to this review, the PopMount 2 Flex isn’t perfect and does have a few flaws. While these aren’t dealbreakers to me by any stretch, they’re definitely worth mentioning.

The first may be my own ineptitude, but I find that it’s not always easy for me to get the mount bent in a way that all four feet make perfect contact with the table or desk that I’m sitting it on. This is mostly annoying if you actually tap your phone while it’s on there, because it will make the mount kind of rock back and forth. Generally, messing with it a little more gets a set up that I prefer. I’m definitely getting the muscle memory needed to get it into the positions I frequently use developed, but I feel like positioning of mount had more of a learning curve than I was expecting.

This isn’t a mount that you can just pull out, make one quick move, and set down on the table — you have to be a bit more intentional about how you place it.

The second minor issue that I have with it is that when you’re tapping the screen of your phone (under the best of conditions) sometimes phone will move just a bit. This is another one of those things that’s probably more “me” than “proper issue with the mount”. but it’s one of those things when I went to tap my mother to call her and accidentally tapped my father instead. I do find that depending on how well you have the mount set up on the table, that will influence how prominent this particular issue occurs, so resolving the one generally clears up the other for me,

In Conclusion

Overall, I really do enjoy the PopMount 2 Flex and it’s an item that I’ll be keeping in my EDC backpack for the foreseeable future — it’s useful around the house, it’s useful at work, it’s useful pretty much everywhere.

While my biggest use cases have been reading comics and a mount for listening to music, I’ve used it while gaming on my iPhone, I’ve used it while watching movies, I’ve used it for taking selfies, I’ve used it for FaceTime calls, and I’ve even used it once as a gimble (mostly because I read that you could and I wanted to try it out).

Compared to a normal tripod (or even a regular PopSocket on its own) I’ve found that it is generally a very useful product. Ironically, the one thing that I haven’t much experience with is actually flexing it around stuff. I never realized until I had this mount how few poles, bars, and handrails exist in my life. Once the pandemic is over, I’ll have to find some railings at the boardwalk overlooking the beach to get some beautiful ocean photography.

Would I recommend this mount to someone to pick up? Absolutely — as long as the two minor gripes I have with it are kept in mind. It does meet my needs very well overall, however, so I’d easily give this product four out of five stars.

The PopMount 2 Flex is available on the PopSockets website for $20 and is available in Black, Miami Sunset, and Tangerine.