Here we’re reviewing the Olixar CD Slot Mount to see if this device holder, which costs a very affordable £13, is one of the must-have caravan accessories for your next tour. This was reviewed as part of our mobile accessory mount group test, designed to help you find the best product for your holidays. But why have these products seen a resurgence in interest of late?

A few years ago, when hands-free phone kits were popular, if you walked into any mobile accessory store, you’d see a great number of accessory mounts for sale, to keep your phone in place when on the road. Today, although hands-free kits have largely been superseded by Bluetooth, these are still useful items as more and more people use their tablets and smartphones as sat-navs, rather than buying separate sat-nav units.

After all, why go to the expense of buying a dedicated device when an app on your smartphone or tablet will do the job? Also, you’re likely to have either your mobile phone or your tablet with you when touring anyway, so there’s little point in carrying a further device. It’s also easy to keep the maps of app-based sat-navs up to date, as your tablet/phone will often be hooked up to the internet, so you know you can rely on the route information you’re given, no matter where in the world you’re touring (although, of course, you should be mindful of data roaming charges when abroad).

However, very few mobile phones and tablets are sold with dedicated in-vehicle mounts, so consumers need to shop around to find the best one for them, hence our group test. And as part of this, as well as this product from Olixar, we also reviewed the Halfords Suction Mount PDA Holder, the Ram Mount X-Grip RAM-HOL-UN7B-KT and two products from Sakura, the Sakura SS5185 Universal Windscreen Mounted Tablet Holder and the Sakura Universal Mobile Phone Holder. Each mount was put through the same test procedure, to determine which is the best.

To ensure the top-rated accessory mounts would hold your device safely and securely wherever your caravan holidays take you, each was fixed in place and taken for a drive down the same bumpy test road.

We also evaluated each to see what size range of device it is able to accommodate, and we wanted to appreciate how easy or otherwise it was to insert your device into and extract it from each accessory mount we tested.

The positioning of the mount itself was also a key part of these reviews, as you need to be able to place the mount in such a way that you can see the information on the display as well as the road ahead. Bonus points were awarded to holders that could be attached to the dashboard and the windscreen, which gives users greater choice.

So, what did we make of the Olixar CD Slot Mount? If the idea of a mount that wedges itself into a CD player’s loading slot seems frankly ludicrous, consider the pros and cons. First, unlike a ventilation grille, a CD player is always very securely held in position – meaning your mount has a substantial foundation. And with so many of us hooking our iPods/phones/MP3 players up to our car’s sound system, that CD slot does tend to lie idle much of the time. On most CD players, using the mount doesn’t actually prevent playing CDs, but moving the mount for every disc change is potentially a pain.

However, decent positioning options and a 4.5cm-10.5cm device size range make this a genuinely credible alternative.