kosertech

I love my Griffin Clarifi, I’ve got about 8 iPhone cases and it’s by far my favorite one but I’ve recently acquired an inCase Power Slider so I removed my Clarifi for the first time in several months to put my iPhone into the Power Slider and I was disappointed to see that the Clarifi and given my iPhone a nice set of scratches.

You can see to the left of the lens in this picture (click for a bigger size) that the macro lens on the Clarifi sliding back and forth has put a nice set of scratches on my iPhone.  I’m sure that the Clarifi on a clean phone is fine and doesn’t lead to scratches but after a bit of time in and out of your pocket/purse your phone picks up some dust.  Since there is nothing between the sliding lens and the phone dust builds up in there and the sliding action plus the dust creates an ideal environment for scratches.  I’d like to see a future iteration of the Clarifi put a plastic shield between the sliding lens and the phone body to prevent the lens from sliding on the phone body.

Below is a picture of the inside of the case where you can see the sliding lens back exposed to the phone body.  As you move the lens back and forth that slides on or very near your iPhone body and small dust or dirt particles between it and your phone will create the scratches.  As I said above a thin layer of plastic and push the lens out slightly further from the phone would solve this.

At any rate I still love my Clarifi and have and will continue to recommend it to many people with this one caveat.

UPDATE:

I got a response from Griffin via twitter which was a bit disappointing.  My other 8 cases haven’t scratched my phone after using them for a few months.  Anyway, I just wanted to include it here for reference sake.

I’ve been trying to figure out why the iPhone didn’t get a camera refresh or a storage bump in the 3g model.  Both things that would have been pretty much direct component swaps without much if any additional engineering effort.

I’ve come to the conclusion it’s to make me want a new model next year.  If they upgrade everything in the revision 1 to include 3G, double storage, 5 megapixel camera, A2DP etc… then I’m going to have no incentive to buy another one next year.  I would guess ultimately they also had an up front goal of getting that price as low as possible on the build construction.

I have a sneaky suspicion that each model is made only attractive enough to get me to want it over the current model.  I keep considering this and as time goes on I’m starting to lean toward the side of buying one again.

The other side of this is perhaps they put so much polish on getting the current features right that there wasn’t time to squeeze anything else in.  The App Store is likely a huge software effort to get it all up and running and integrated into iTunes.

I believe after the initial surge of lines out the door is over I’m going to take the plunge and get an iPhone 3G in the hopes that I’ll still be able to move the sim back to my other phones if I want to.  I’ve had windows mobile phones for years and years and I think it’s time I took a look at something else.  I get bored easy and windows mobile isn’t exciting me lately.  Maybe windows mobile 7 will make me want to swap back but it’s a long way off.  I’m in the habit of getting new phones every 6-12 months.

I have sworn up and down for years that I was operating system agnostic and it didn’t matter what I used but when I upgraded my laptop a month ago I went with a black MacBook primarily for form factor and i’ve been extremely happy.  I wish I’d made the jump years ago when OSX was released.

For some other musings that have lead up to this decision please have a read at my earlier posts

[iPhone and lack of local user storage]

[To iPhone or not to iPhone]

Honestly, I can’t make up my mind.  After the WWDC keynote I was ready to throw down my $200 and join the happy iPhone camp.  As more time passes and the reality distortion field lifts I’m waffling back and forth about weather an iPhone would be a good device for me.  I spent about an hour typing solid on my friends iPhone in the notes applications today and decided to write up some thoughts about it.

There are a few things that bother me about the iPhone right now:

1. No A2DP support
2. Typing on the touchscreen sucks
3. The camera isn’t very good
4. No background running applications from the app store
5. No system level apps from app store, i.e. someone cant make a new keyboard with haptic
6. No Copy/Paste (whats up with this really?   so insane)

There are lots of great things going for the new iPhone though:

1. GPS (huzzah! I use this all the time on my winmo phone)
2. App store
3. Very slick interface
4. MobileMe
5. Next Generation OS
6. The browser freaking rocks

Things I commonly do with my current ATT Tilt

1. SSH access
2. A2DP
3. Instant Messaging with IM+ (always stays on, restablish after calls runs in background)
4. Web access
5. Slingbox
6. MS Live Search / Google Maps for turn by turn directions
7. Java Midlets

Of the above seven, I would loose the ability to do 2,3,7 right out of the box if I switched.  In theory A2DP could be added in a future update, and someone might port a midlet manager to the app store though I’m guessing this would be a very large undertaking.  I don’t see being able to run background applications anytime in the near future on the iPhone, Apple illustrated as much by trying to spin their push notification as a replacement for this.  It’s not that you can’t do some really cool stuff with the push architecture they are making available to the developers but It’s not a replacement for a true multitasking environment.

Decisions Decisions……