cases - page 17

The iPhone gets great battery life, but we no longer live in the era of simple cell phones with week long battery life. That smartphone in your pocket isn’t just a way to make calls, but a real humming along inside your pocket, checking email, playing music, keeping an eye on your location, accepting text messages, sucking up push notifications, running Skype and a million other uses beside. That all takes up precious charge, and the more you pull that iPhone out of your pocket, the more quickly you use your battery up.

Given the realities of smartphone power management, battery cases like the Mophie Juice Pack are a necessary evil. Sure, they double and sometimes triple your battery life, but they also double and sometimes triple the size of your iPhone in your pocket. Worse, they are all-or-nothing affairs: if you want to use one, you need to take your existing case off your phone and put the juice pack on instead.

Boostcase’s new Hybrid Case does away with all that. It’s really two cases in one: a lightweight plastic protective case that can snap onto a beefy battery upgrade pack as needed that can juice your iPhone back up. And it’s a pretty great choice for anyone who doesn’t want to juggle cases on the go.

This brass knuckles iPhone case isn’t straight out of Compton, it IS Compton. Meet the iKnucks – the iPhone case that doubles as a set of vicious brass knuckles. What better way to protect yourself from muggers than slipping this mean puppy around your fingers and throwing some haymakers?

These cute little iPhone cases are made from nothing more than paper napkins and a little bit of lacquer. Using a technique called decoupage, these cases are made by hand in Thailand and sold on Etsy under the NapPage brand.

What I love about them is that the whimsical designs are fashioned into such clean, professionally finished cases.

If you’re waiting for your new iPad to arrive, you might be wondering about cases. The difference in the thickness between an iPad 2 and an iPad 3 is only about half a millimeter: is that enough to mean you need to buy a new case?

After putting our new iPad through its paces, we’re happy to say that it will probably be a very rare thing indeed for a case to be incompatible with the new iPad.

Until now, most of the 3-D printed items I have seen have been slightly scratchy, brittle-feeling plastic prototypes sent to me by Kickstarter pitch-men.

But now Shapeways has teamed up with SoundCloud to bring us this cool-looking iPhone case which really shows the potential of 3-D printing. Using a custom app, you can freeze the sound-wave of your favorite piece of music and have it immortalized in a plastic case.

The Gymbl Pro is a combo case and tripod for your iPhone 4/S, released last year to great success on Kickstarter. The polycarbonate case has a slot which marries up to a folding, pocket-sized tripod which also doubles as a handgrip. But what of poor Gymbl owners who have a yen to tote their iPhone around their necks like some kind of modern day Flava Flav? Well Gordon Fowler, the man behind the Gymbl, has you covered.

Behold: The Gymbl Latch and Lanyard.

DODOcase makes some great iOS device accessories, but they’re most known for their series of unique iPad cases. Apple’s new iPad is arriving this Friday, and DODOcase has announced its new line of books cases for the magical tablet.

The Classic ($60), Essentials ($70), and Spring Summer ($80) lines are available for purchase now.

The new iPad is almost identical to the old iPad, in terms of its physical dimensions at least. This means that many of your old accessories will fit it, and some will not. Styluses, of course, will be just fine, but cases and docks will either just squeeze on, or not fit at all.

So what should you look out for when considering an upgrade for your accessories as well as your iPad?

I’ll come out and say this right at the beginning: I don’t like to put my Apple gear into cases. I went for years with an iPod Touch bareback in my jeans pocket, but with the iPad there was just too much easy-to-scratch screen on there. All the cases I tried were bulky or inelegant or just plain junk. I settled on Apple’s case, although that was a little like putting a supermodel in a wetsuit.

With the iPad 2, I have used the Smart Cover exclusively, with a rear skin sometimes. But now, I’m totally gaga over this hot little number from Skech. And here’s why.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Speck, the prolific and (very friendly) gadget case maker, had something very special on show at the Mobile World Congress Mobile Focus even last night: An iPad 3 case, which you see above, now liberated and comfortable in the Cult of Mac Barcelona HQ. But all is not as it seems. It turns out the case isn’t quite as mysterious as you might think.

If you’re serious about your iPhoneography (and you should be, with such a great camera always in your pocket), then you might want to take a look at the ridiculously over-achieving iPhone Rangefinder case, from our fine friends at Photojojo. The two-piece polycarbonate case slips over the phone and adds a shutter button, a viewfinder and even interchangeable lenses. It’s pretty neat.

Cirago’s Aluminum Bluetooth Keyboard Case looks mighty familiar, huh? It’s almost as if the designers at Cirago took Zagg’s/Logitech’s iPad 2 keyboard case, filed of some corners and added a kickstand. Then again, as just about the only thing wrong with the Zagg is the non-adjustable stand, maybe that’s not such a bad idea.

The Quad Lock case is a universal mount and case for the iPhone 4/S. Wait. Where are you going? This case is actually very cool. I promise, especially if you have a home, a car or a bike.

Apple’s designs constantly prove that beauty and practicality can exist in the same place, but that’s clearly not the only way to do things. Take a look at the AQUA TEK S, which manages to be possibly the most practical and the most ugly iPhone case ever. It bills itself as “the first ever battery powered, solar charged, rugged under water iPhone 4/4S case on Kickstarter.”

Never have I felt worse about buying a gadget accessory than I did buying the Speck SmartShell, a flimsy plastic cover for the back of the iPad 2 which Speck somehow summons the stones to sell for $35. Worse, I bought it in Europe, where it goes for €30, or $40. After a few months of use, though, it turns out to be the best iPad “case” I own (and I have rather a lot).

Oh, man. We’ve seen some dorky iPad accessories in our time, but none has managed to be both embarrassing and stylish at the same time. The GoPad performs this seemingly impossible feat, and adds a little bit of campness at the same time.

The iPhone makes a wonderful bike computer. It’s tough, comes with great GPS and can be loaded with zillions of navigation and fitness apps. It also enjoys a wide range of ready-made handlebar mounts.

But the iPad, possibly even more useful as a map thanks to its large screen and crazy-long battery life, has precisely zero bike mounts available. So I decided to make one. Here’s how:

As a nerd, it’s almost certain that you still haven’t bought a Valentine’s Day gift for your significant other (heck, as a nerd it’s not even certain you have a significant other). An inkling at the back of your mind tells you that flowers are too obvious, but your geek brain can’t conceive of any romantic gift that isn’t also practical. Fear not. We have news of the most romantic (and practical) gift money can buy: the Pink Little Black Book for iPhone.

If you do a lot of typing on your iPad, the ZAGGFolio keyboard case should be on your list of things to try. It’s a nice wireless keyboard and solid iPad case combined in one reasonably-priced unit. Let’s take a closer look.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — Odds are that giving away free stuff will attract people to your CES booth no matter how high the level of suckiness of said free product. Earlier this morning Case-Mate wasn’t even giving away free cases, they were giving away fragments of free cases, but their booth was still mobbed by an army of swag seeking CES attendees, proving once again that freebies and booth-girls are still a viable way to get your product a momentary flash of attention.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – Texting on the iPhone’s 3.5-inch touchscreen is about as good as you can expect, but wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to fit a full-size keyboard in there for good measure?

Celluon thinks there’s a way to do just that with the Prodigy, a Juice Pack-style battery case for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s with one interesting trick up its sleeve: it can project an interactive infrared keyboard onto any flat surface.

In theory, this means effortless typing as long as you can prop your iPhone up on a table or desk. The reality, though? Stick to texting.

No one enjoys slapping a case on their iPhone. They add weight, extra bulk, and almost always ruin the beautiful look of your device. If you want to protect it, however, there’s no other way.

Or is there? A company called Liquipel claims to make your iPhone waterproof without a case. It uses a special water resistant “nano” coating which repels water, allowing you to actually submerge you device into a bucket of juice — naked — without killing it.

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – We’ve seen countless solutions to finding lost car keys over the past few decades, but this latest solution from Treehouse Labs makes the attempt to be practical and fun while solving one of mankind’s greatest problems through an iPhone app. Bikn is a location tracking solution to help you find anything that has a tendency to get lost: dogs, purses, cameras, your grandparents at Wal-Mart, you name it. By attaching a small location tracker to any item you tend to lose, Bikn makes finding things easier than ever.

Look at that big ugly thing. It’s not pretty, it’s boring, and it’s not even all that protective — leaving the top and bottom ends of your iPhone exposed to the elements. But despite these insufficiencies, its manufacturers will charge you $10,000 for the thing simply because it’s made from solid gold.

New at PhotoJojo is this crazy Holga iPhone lens case that gives you nine special effects for your photos.