I was running into an issue: I keep my work iPhone and personal iPhone in the same front pocket, and one of the two will always scratch the other one. Specifically, the hideous camera bump, and metal trimmed sapphire lenses, will scratch the screen on the other phone. To combat this, I kept my work phone in a case to buffer the camera block from my personal phone — that only slightly solved the issue.
I decided I needed to make a change, and this phone case drew me in with the allure of something sumptuous to carry. It’s not a particularly convenient case, or perhaps even stellar, but I truly love using it — it’s pretty good.
Specs & Materials
There’s a few leather options for this case, but I went with the classic leather, as I love the look. It’s device size specific, and adds as low of bulk as two layers of leather can add to your phone.
The lining is alcantara, which if you don’t know what that is — it’s a leather variant of microfiber, and it feels like pure luxury. The design of this case is effectively an outer leather sleeve, with and inner alcantara lining. It’s open on the top, and that opening wraps down one side. There’s an opening at the bottom to try and fish a lightning cable into as well.
The top 2/3rds or so of the alcantara and outer leather is not adhered, so you can use those two areas to stash flat things like a card or cash bill. Other than that, it’s pretty simple. It’s very well made.
In Use
The first thing you need to understand about this case, is that the way it feels in hand, is sublime. So much so, that all the other cruft you put up with when you use this, all becomes excused every single time you hold this case. The leather is that nice in hand, that supple. It’s fantastic. I’ll refrain from talking about this more, but know how much I like the leather on this case.
The next thing, is that while those little pockets seem like gimmicks, I actually love them and use them a lot. I usually keep a single bill of some small denomination in one side so I have something on hand at all times. In the other side I keep my access card for work, which makes it very easy to tap and enter the office, while knowing I won’t forget my keycard, as I won’t forget my work phone.
The issue there, though, is these stash pockets are not secured, so my key card would almost come all the way out a lot of the time. I resolved that by placing a strip of athletic tape on the card, which creates enough friction against the leather, the card stays put. But this is another issue generally with this case, even the iPhone can slip right out of the case. There’s been more than a couple times when a less than good position caused my iPhone to slide out of the case and drop to whatever gravity took it to. Thankfully, it survived each time, but there’s a bit of intention needed here if you actually want to use this case without dropping your iPhone.
On another note that I will make here is that the opening for using a charger while the phone is in the case is not great. There’s no downside to it being a part of the design, but it’s fiddly and annoying to use.
But, for my use case of being able to keep two phones in a single pocket, this works great. It stays slim enough that it’s not a big issue to do this. But there’s an unexpected benefit: I carry this in my hand more, or drop it in my back pocket while I walk. Because the screen is covered, I don’t have to worry about accidentally doing things on the device, and so I tend to not carry it in my pocket as much — big win. I also know the device is protected from scratches when I want to toss it into a pocket of my bag.
The one design flaw I found (the phone slipping out isn’t really a flaw, but a side effect) is with the inner alcantara sleeve, because it’s not secured in any spots at the top, it does tend to get in the way of your phone when you go to slide the device in. If it had a single stitch at the fold of the spine, then it would likely stay put without impacting how useful the extra pockets are. I might do this modification myself. Without that stitch, trying to drop the phone into the case, can lead to that inner sleeve crumpling down into the case, and blocking the phone from doing so. It’s a bit fiddly.
Overall
I like it. I actually like it enough that I am on the edge of buying another for my personal phone, and certainly enough that I picked up a couple more items from Hardgraft now that I remember just how good their leather is. Big fan, but I would have a hard to recommending this generally given how fiddly the entire thing can be.