5. More Prima Case Craziness

Unfortunately, the humor doesn’t end here. In what has to be the design and manufacturing blooper of the year, Prima managed to build the case so that it completely covers both the iPhone’s bottom microphone and speaker.

Here’s the bottom of my iPhone without any case. The speaker is on the left and the microphone is on the right. The thing in the middle is a jack for the standard iPod-iPhone 30 pin plug.

Now, here’s my iPhone in the incase case. Notice how the speaker, 30 pin jack and microphone are all exposed as they should be and how the bottom corners are protected by the case.

Now, get ready to laugh. Here’s my iPhone in Prima’s case. The 30 pin jack is exposed, but the speaker and microphone are almost entirely covered and the corners of my iPhone are exposed so they can be more easily damaged if I drop the phone.

So, I guess I have to remove the phone every time I want to make a call and go through that lovely in and out of the incase case ritual. No way.

Wait, there’s one more bit of silliness. Take a look at the inside of the front cover of the case. Those full-width pockets in the middle are supposed to hold business cards. I couldn’t stuff even one business card into any of the slots. The two pockets at the top are for memory cards. Of course, with 8 GB of memory and following Apple’s no-slot i-memory policy, the iPhone has no place to insert external memory cards, but by this time, you, like I, have probably given up on Prima’s kookie case. Perhaps we should be happy that nothing will either fit or go into those pockets, because whatever we might stuff into them could press into the display and break it.

The Prima case really bothered me. How can a company foist such a piece of crap on an unsuspecting iPhone public?