Dragons’ Den’s Peter Jones must understand the anguish we all suffer when we drop our phones as his latest investment is in Tech21, a company that specialises in impact protection for mobile devices. During Tech21’s presentation on the Den it showed off something rather cool that we had to check out more closely — an iPhone case that uses something called d3o. Watch our video to see how d3o works and click on the next page if you want to see pictures of the d3o-inspired iPhone and iPod Touch iBand case.
As the name suggests, the iBand is a band that fits around your iPhone or iPod Touch. Tech21 is developing cases for more phones soon.
Within the band you can see there’s a strip of d3o inside that apparently disperses shock on impact.
Although you can access your iPhone’s controls from the outside we found accessing the mute toggle switch a little difficult. We also noticed that the hole for headphones is rather thin and only fits headphones with thin pins — the in-the-box iPhone ones fit fine, for example, but our Sennheisers didn’t.
It’s not the slickest looking case out there but it does give you full access to the screen and offers substantial protection, as you can see in our video.
Overall we were impressed with the level of protection that the iBand offers but hope to see more refined designs in the future. The iBand costs around £15 and can be bought from eXpansys.
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