Otterbox, based in Fort Collins, Colorado, has a long history in building protective cases for equipment, the kind of heavy plastic suitcase you might see a band's road crew carrying expensive gear in.
A few years back, the company began making smaller boxes to hold phones and GPS units, but the downside was that - while protecting these small consumer devices - the device itself was not accessible to use. So the company branched in to the field of heavily protective shells, form-fitted to particular devices.
Besides a variety of Blackberry models, Otterbox also has one for the iPhone with the fitting name of Defender. While the unit adds both size and a slight amount of weight to the iPhone, for those who need heavy protection in the field, it's not really much larger than the first-generation iPhone or the early Palm Pilot digital assistants.
Defender covers every possible connection and opening on the iPhone, including the camera. It does so through a series of two protective layers: the outer is very similar to a neoprene skin found on many iPhones. The benefit of this skin is that adds a no-slip grip to the overall phone, it can be washed, and it has a softer feel than the inner shell.
In our tests, the outer skin did a good job of collecting most of the dirt, as it covers most of the phone, minus the iPhone's large screen. Flaps also cover the headphone and charging/docking jacks as well as the on-off switch.
The outer skin was easily cleaned with soap and water, and dried relatively quickly. Over time, and with frequent washings, though, this may be the one part of the Defender that requires consistent replacement.
The inner shell is a molded, rigid plastic, with clear sheets of thin plastic film integrated to cover user-accessible areas such as the screen and the camera.
We ran our iPhone 3GS units, one black 32GB and one white 16GB one, through a series of video field tests in early August, in preparation for iPhone 3.1
One such test was to use the camera on a construction site, which involved sawdust, concrete mixing and a variety of other small-particle dangers for delicate electronics. Given Apple's recent reports of iPhones and iPod touch players exploding after being dropped, we also wanted maximum protection against accidental drops or knocks by power tools, etc.
The protective case performed admirably in this harsh environment; after returning to the office and extracting the iPhone from the Defender shell, we found no scratches or other signs of damage to the phone, even though the Defender's outer shell was covered in saw and concrete dust.
The one weakness we found in the Defender is the crevice in which the camera sits. The camera lens, on the upper left of the iPhone's curved back, is covered by a thin film, surrounded by a small ring of rigid plastic that the Defender places around the lens.
To shoot properly, we weren't able to just wipe the dust away from the lens, as we would do with a naked iPhone, so we had to resort to using compressed air to blow the dust out. With dirt or fingerprints, however, this could become a show stopper since the Defender doesn't wipe away dirt and grime from the phone body as easily as it is wiped away from a naked iPhone. The thin plastic, too, is more prone to easy scratching than the iPhone's camera glass, which could cause degradation of image and video capture after just a few cleanings.
One accessory is bundled with the Defender: a belt clip with wings that snap in to the edges of the Defender case. For added protection, the iPhone faced inward, toward the body, to further protect the screen from impact while worn in the belt clip. The complete package, then, looks like a black rectangle when worn. Functional? Absolutely. Fashion Statement? Probably not.
This, then, is the quandary of the Defender: the bulkiness is to be expected with a unit that adequately protects the iPhone; while it's not really bulky, as it's smaller than many two-year old PDAs, when wrapped around the iPhone, it feels bulky enough to make one think twice about using the Defender as a permanent protection solution.
Otterbox will, I'm sure, be willing to sell you two solutions: the Defender for those must-protect dirty projects and the Impact series of cases, offering moderate protection with corresponding lesser bulk.
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