Skin Tight for iPod Shuffle
Company: Speck Products
Price: $19.99
http://www.speckproducts.com
Speck is a swell company in my book. They have taken to making some really innovative and attractive iPod cases, and have done so for a few years now. No Johnny-Come-Lately to the iPod bandwagon is Speck.
They also have this tendency to ship me every new product they come out with, which is fine as long as they don’t expect a review for each product that I didn’t request. For instance, I own only a second-generation iPod, so the cases for the new iPods or iPod Mini they send is not really something I can review. Sure, I could say “It looks nice†but that’s not much of a review.
My wife, however, does own a 1GB iPod Shuffle, which she uses at work all the time. She loves it, can’t say enough good things about it. That being said, she was even more pleased when the Fed-Ex truck dropped off the latest Speck product for my perusal, the Skin Tight case for the iPod Shuffle.
In essence, this is a rubber-like case for the Shuffle. It works by fitting your Shuffle into the on/off and shuffle switch on the back of the unit, and pushing and pulling your Shuffle into place.
As the name suggest, this case fits the Shuffle tightly. It becomes almost a second skin in fact. (Hey, Skin Tight!) They come in various colors, including Blue, Green, Red, White, Pink, and Black. Speck shipped a three-pack of them, including the White, Pink, and Black. I think the Black looks cool, but my wife likes the Pink.
In addition to the Skin Tight, Speck also includes a plastic and rubbery cap to fit over the USB plug on the Shuffle. It works fine and fits as well as the stock white plastic cap that ships with the Apple iPod Shuffle. But there is one problem here, and that is Speck does not include a Lanyard with this case or USB caps, as Apple does with the Shuffle. Moreover, there’s no place or option to connect a Lanyard to the Skin Tight case. Once your iPod Shuffle is in the case, there is no way to connect it to a Lanyard. This is really a serious omission.
Getting your Shuffle out of one of these cases is no easy task. Plastic and rubber like to bond tightly, so you literally have to peel the Skin Tight case off your Shuffle. While I have not done so thus far, I felt that either the Shuffle was either going to crack under all the wrestling to get it out of this case, or the rubber case itself may tear. Neither happened, but it did make me a bit weary about doing this many times in the future.
While a good concept, it was only taken part of the way to completion. With no way to connect a Lanyard short of using the USB cap that came with your Shuffle (thus having a white cap on your colored iPod) you are forced to use either the old iPod in your pocket method, or an armband.
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