A couple of notes on the lightning adapter which I received last week and installed into my Elevation Dock:
First, the build quality of the adapter is just as good as the Elevation Dock itself. I had no trouble installing the adapter. The adapter came with two allen wrenches for the screws that hold everything together.
But beyond that, things go south...
The "adapter" is a metal clamp that holds your *existing* Apple lightning cable in place within the Elevation Dock. The adapter does not include any electronic components like the original dock parts. You must use the lightning cable that came with your phone or buy one aftermarket, and it MUST be an Apple-brand $17+ cord, or it won't fit in the clamp properly. (Oh, if you find a brand of lightning cord that both fits in the adapter and doesn't set off the "unofficial product" warnings on the phone, let me know.) Do not buy a $3 cord and expect it to fit in this adapter properly.
When I dock my iPhone 5s into the port, the rubber support no longer supports the phone like it did with the 4 and 4s. In fact, I can't insert the 5s with case (a thin iFrogz case) into the dock without removing the rubber support. What I'm left with is the entire phone resting on the lightning connector that extends from the base of the dock. There is nothing supporting the phone but the lightning plug.
Why not adjust the connector down into the dock so that the phone can sit flush, you ask? Because to put the lightning connector into the dock in the first place, you need to practically crimp the cord at the stress relief sleeve just to get it to fit into the adapter. Simply looking at the strain on the cord at this point makes me cringe. I'm sure it's fine, because it's locked in, but it's really bent, and there's no room for movement.
The extra cash I spent on the Elevation Dock with audio support? Wasted. There is no audio connection on the adapter. There is also no 1/8" headphone jack on the adapter to pass through audio. Thankfully the one audio dock (of the three I backed) will serve my wife's iPhone 4s well enough.
One of the big selling points of the Elevation Dock was that you didn't need to push down on the Dock to remove the phone. Since the lightning adapter uses a standard connector, and the connector is designed to remain fastened to the phone unless using some force, the weight of the dock is no longer sufficient to hold the dock down when removing the phone. A Nanopad sticker is included in the package to affix the Dock to a surface.
I applied the Nanopad to the bottom of the Dock, then placed the dock back in its original location. The Nanopad was successful in suctioning the Dock to this surface -- too successful. I had great difficulty removing the Dock after it stuck to reposition it. I was finally able to pry it up, but it is still disconcerting that this behaves so much like adhesive, which is what I was trying to avoid with the Elevation Dock in the first place!
Also, finally, the adapter is red. No idea why. Not really an issue, but somehow unnerves me to know that it's in there... Being red.
Generally, I like the look and build quality of the Elevation Dock, but I think some significant effort needs to be undertaken to update the lightning adapter to bring it in line with the quality expectation of the rest of the Dock. Hopefully Elevation Lab's got something good up their sleeves for the future, because this adapter alone is insufficient.
