If protection is your racket, you'll have a hard time finding better armor for your iPhone than the products that come out of OtterBox. The company has been making cases for sensitive equipment for years, specializing in products that are rugged and resilient, and the $50 OtterBox for Apple iPhone Defender Series is no exception. A robust combination hardshell/silicone skin, the Defender is an excellent case for the iPhone—perhaps the best I've seen to date.
The protection in the Defender comes in layers: a rigid-plastic internal case is covered by an outer "skin" of rubberized silicone that fits like a wetsuit. The silicone exterior provide shock absorbency; you can drop the case on the ground and it will bounce, not shatter. The interior hardshell affords solid protection from bumps, drops, and crushing, meaning that your iPhone never gets so much as a dent or a ding.
Unlike OtterBox's Armor series (also reviewed here), the Defender is not waterproof--you can't submerge it, for example--but it will hold up just fine if you have to use the iPhone in light inclement weather.
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Patent lawsuits are more common these days than...uh, pre-approved credit card mailers. (Sorry. Looked around my desk and couldn't find anything else. And people say writing is easy. As if.)
Apple is again being slapped by a "some thing that does some stuff" patent suit, this time by Minerva Industries, a company just granted a patent for a "mobile entertainment and communication device" that has "a cellular or satellite telephone capable of wireless communication with the internet."
Ah. Huh. Minerva is also suing AT&T and 31 other tech/cell companies, claiming all of them sell/produce devices that infringe on their patent. Their patent that covers entertainment gadgets that connect to cell networks. Experts believe the patent is too broad and will be shot down in court...but c'mon: Doesn't anyone check this stuff beforehand?
That's it. I'm filing a patent for "any device that accepts any input, produces any output, or requires power to function," and then I'm going to sue every tech company, engineer, and electronics student in the country until I'm rich enough to buy Hawaii. And if you've got a problem with that...well, take it to the USPTO. They obviously know what they're doing.
[via Macworld UK]
With a name like Protective Cover for iPhone, where can you really go wrong? Well, you may need to start by putting asterisks next to "cover." Incase's offering is a $30 molded rubber case for the iPhone that has its fair share of strengths and weaknesses.
Using the Protective Cover couldn't be easier: just slip the iPhone into the case, which has been hollowed out to fit the phone like a glove. Openings have been left for the headphone jack, camera, Ring/Silent switch, and there's also a large opening at the bottom for the microphone, speaker, and dock-connector port. In addition, the case provides useful raised nubs that let you easily find and use the volume buttons and Sleep/Wake button. The large opening at the front makes putting the phone in and taking it out of the case a snap, but the downside is that it provides no protection at all for the iPhone's screen, though it does make using the multi-touch interface easy.
The molded rubber is somewhat thicker than many of the silicone skin iPhone cases you'll find on the market, but the case doesn't add that much bulk to the phone's profile; it's still easy enough to slip the whole thing in your pocket. The combination of the rubber's tactile feel and the swirly fingerprint-like pattern molded into the case do confer one major benefit: it makes the phone's slippery exterior considerably easier to get a grip on. And the material is thick enough to provide some protection if you drop the iPhone, unless, of course, you drop it on the uncovered screen.
As with many other cases, the Protective Cover suffers from one irritating issue: due to the large opening for the screen, dust and other small particles can become trapped beneath the case, especially if you keep it in your pocket. Such particles won't usually hurt the phone, though they can in some instances scratch the chrome ring around the iPhone's screen. It's hard to prevent this from happening, but from time to time, it's probably worth it to take the phone out of the case and brush it off.
The $30 price tag is a bit steep for what the Protective Cover is: a piece of rubber that protects only half of the phone. Plus, some of the colors are slightly on the garish side, such as the cyan model that I tested, though that's largely a matter of personal preference. Overall, the Incase Protective Cover for iPhone is a solid iPhone case, but not one that stands out from the crowd.
The other day, we talked about everybody's favorite mystery: what happened to all those iPhones that Apple says they've sold, but which AT&T hasn't activated? The consensus seems to be that these phones are being unlocked and emigrating from the US to countries where the carriers don't yet have deals with Apple.
At this point, the evidence is pretty much anecdotal, but that doesn't make it any less compelling. Over at the New York Times's Bits blog, Damon Darlin has posted an extensive list of comments from readers that report iPhones being used and sold in more than a dozen countries around the world, from Canada to Uganda and almost everywhere in between.
Does this mean terrible things for Apple? Speculation has long been that Apple gets a cut of the carriers' incomes per subscriber, so some have suggested that the "missing" iPhones could mean millions in lost revenue for Apple.
That's hardly true, though, as ITWire's Stephen Withers rightly points out:
There's no suggestion that iPhones are in short supply, so you can't argue that each one that moves across the borders denies Apple the revenue it would have received indirectly from a customer in the country where it was originally sold.It's not as if those purchasing the iPhone for use in other countries are some how depriving users in France, Germany, the UK, or the US of iPhones. In fact, the very point we're arguing seems to say the iPhones are plentiful: if they weren't being bought by others around the world, they probably just wouldn't be bought. And since Apple obviously makes good money on each iPhone sold, whether or not the iPhone is activated through a partner, it's not as if they're losing money. Rather, the money they get from the carriers is just icing on a delicious and profitable cake.
Good news for iPhoners across the pond: you're about to get more for your money. Mobile phone operator O2, Apple's exclusive iPhone partner in the UK, announced this morning that it would be restructuring its rate plans effective February 1st, including those for iPhone customers.
Subscribers to the £35/month tariff will get three times the minutes and more than twice as many SMS messages per month for the same price, while users of the current £55/month plan will have the option to go down to a £45/month plan, with the same amount of minutes and texts, or reach for the sky with the new £75/month tariff, which includes 3000 minutes and 500 texts a month. And, of course, iPhone customers will continue to get free unlimited data and free access to The Cloud of Wi-Fi hotspots.
Hey, AT&T, how about a price break and some Wi-Fi access over here, hmm?
[via iPod Observer]
I'm a klutz with...well, everything. If I can drop it, I will drop it, no matter what it is. I've destroyed several laptops--including my beloved 12-inch PowerBook G4--and multiple iPods because of unpreventable clumsiness, and I've come to accept the fact that I'll often have to buy a product several times because I'm incapable of keeping the first unit intact. Even my iPhone is banged-up and dented from multiple forehead-slapping collisions with concrete--including an accidental drop down a garbage shoot--and I've developed a thick skin when it comes to cosmetic flaws on my gadgets.
OtterBox was obviously thinking of people like me--as well as people who do things like hike and climb mountains and other dangerous outdoors-y activities--when they developed the wicked Armor Series case for the iPhone. The company's been around for a while, creating tank-like protection for portable gadgets, and the Armor case for the iPhone gives me hope that perhaps I won't need to buy multiple iPhones in the future because of my butter-covered, klutz-stricken fingers.
Continue reading "Review: OtterBox Armor Series for iPhone"
I've got a box of a dozen or so iPhone covers to test and write about. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten to writing about any of them. Part of that is because, over the past couple months, I've been swamped with work. But there's more at fault here than just my schedule: the other factor in my lack of productivity is, in fact, one of those cases.
Ever since I started using my iPhone back in June, I've been in search of the ideal case. My requirements were, I thought, pretty simple. I wanted a case that would offer both the case and the screen some level of protection if I were to drop my iPhone, and yet didn't make the iPhone too thick to slip into a pocket, which is my preferred carrying location. I've seen tons of cases: hard acrylic, soft rubber, padded leather, and even one combination unit that used both hard acrylic and soft rubber. But none of these cases met my requirements--most didn't offer any form of screen protection (or they just offered a scratch-blocking clear overlay), and they were uniformly bulky. Thicker cases can also make it harder to type, as they interfere with your fingers as they approach the edges of the screen.
About a month ago, I received a case that immediately caught my eye: the creatively-named $40 iPhone Full Leather Jacket from Pacific Rim Technologies. From the outside, this case--which I'll call the FLJ for ease of typing--doesn't look like much. It's a rigid case covered in black leather, with soft felt on the inside and curved edges that wrap up and around to hold the iPhone in place. There's a mount on the back for a belt clip; thankfully, the clip mechanism can be removed leaving only a small bump on the otherwise-smooth back of the case. (I'm not much of a belt clip person--"Hey, look, come steal this expensive electronic device strapped to my belt!"--but I tested this one out, and it seemed to work just fine.)
Continue reading "PRT Gear Full Leather Jacket iPhone case"
A couple weeks back, Orange CEO Didier Lombard announced that Apple's French telecom partner had logged 70,000 iPhone sales in 2007. The number was pretty much in the middle of earlier estimates that ranged between 50,000 and 100,000.
Now it's Germany's turn. T-Mobile's CEO Philipp Humm (pictured) said this weekend that they'd reached the same number. Despite the fact that T-Mobile says the iPhone is "the most sold multimedia device in T-Mobile's portfolio," it's interesting to note that it took the provider 11 weeks to reach that number, as they began selling the iPhone on November 9 of last year; the iPhone was actually launched later in France, having not reached that country until November 28th. So it took Germany more than twice as long to sell the same number of phone, perhaps indicating that the demand in that country isn't quite as strong.
There are as of yet no hard numbers for the UK, the other European country in which the phone is being sold, though unofficial estimates suggest that sales there have been stronger than in France in Germany. There's also the question of just how much sales of unlocked phones have contributed to lower demand in those countries. Unlocked phones were also sold briefly in Germany when rival provider Vodafone took T-Mobile to court for its exclusive deal with Apple, which could also affect sales figures.
[via Infinite Loop]
