And Yet Another Apple Weblog

• Home
• Reviews
  • Storm Backup Battery
  • More-thing Metallic
  • SeeThru
  • Clear Naked
  • Sleek Crystal
  • Clarifi
  • ArtText 2
  • Weather Apps
  • DLO iPhone Speakers
  • DLO Auto Charger
  • iPhone: YouNote
  • iPhone: Whip
  • iPhone: Car Care
  • Mozy Unlimited
• Learning Center
• 3G Survival Guide
• Site Map
• Search
• Contact

Clear Naked, Case-Mate

MRSP: $24.99

What’s in the box:

Clear Naked case with integrated shield protector

With a name like Clear Naked expectations were high: maybe too high. After all, being naked is clearly a transcendent experience and one that we were looking forward to exposing our iPhone to.

Unfortunately, Case-mate’s Clear Naked case left us disappointed.

We knew things wouldn’t be good when we first held the Clear Naked empty in our grubby little AYAAW hands. It’s very light weight, almost to the point of feeling inconsequential. Normally this wouldn’t be a negative, after all light is good right? In this case, however, the Clear Naked just feels cheap.

Things didn’t get any better when we tucked our precious iPhone into the Clear Naked. First of all, it was hard to get it in the case. We had to fiddle, poke and prod until we finally heard the case snap close. It wasn’t easy. Add to that the overly deep cut-outs that make pressing buttons an onerous operation and things were going from bad to worse.

Admittedly, attractiveness is a somewhat subjective area: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Having said that, we feel this case detracts from the sleek and way-too-cool appearance of our iPhone. In order to attach the protective face shield to the rest of the case, Case-Mate created this icky black border thing that we’re assuming covers up the seam between the case and the shield. It just plain looks bad in our opinion but as we said this is subjective and you might not think the same. The border also seems to have contributed to the horizontal bulkiness of the shell and this in turn makes accessing the volume up and down buttons even harder than other shells we’ve tested.

Then there’s the extra large ear speaker cut-out. It’s way larger then the actual ear speaker and looks out of place. The question is, then, why did Case-mate make opening so large? The only conclusion we could come up with was that they wanted to have the cut-out extend over the iPhone’s proximity and ambient light sensors. If that is in fact the case, they should’ve tried to create separate cut-outs for each. It would’ve been much less unattractive that way.

The built in screen protector presents its own problems. Although it’s not supposed affect the responsiveness of the iPhones touch screen, in our testing it does. We’ve used screen protectors before, the static cling kind you just stick to the screen of your iPhone, and have never experienced any loss of touch responsiveness. The screen protector attached to the Clear Naked feels thicker, however, then the stick-on variety so that may be the reason. Also, we don’t believe that this type of touchscreen shield could ever physically come as close to the iPhone’s screen as a stick-on shield, no matter how thin and well engineered.

The Clear Naked goes for $34.95 and in our opinion isn’t nearly as well engineered as Griffin’s Clarifi or PDO’s Sleek Crystal. If you don’t mind a case that takes a hit in terms of attractiveness but includes a built-in screen protector, consider the Clear Naked. If being able to show off the coolest gadget on the face of the planet is at all important too you, look elsewhere.