Consider the smartphone — slim lines, gorgeous materials, hyper-thin profile. Engineers ate out of a pizza box for a year to shave half a millimeter off that thing. Then you come along with your hideous rubber case. Why should they bother?

More important, why should you spend $600 on a triumph of design only to stick it in a sarcophagus?

A rubber case “will absorb some of the energy” of an accident “which would otherwise go into, and potentially damage, the phone, a bit like a car shock absorber,” wrote Sigrid Adriaenssens, Ph.D, an assistant professor at Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, in an email. She added in a follow-up call that if the case is very thin, “there’s no point having it.”

With plastic cases, “the frame acts more like an exoskeleton from non-impact loads on the outside,” Adriaenssens wrote, citing “a little boy standing on the phone with one foot,” for example. By the same token, a rigid plastic frame won’t absorb shocks as effectively as a rubber one.

So a case, cumbersome as it is, offers some protection. But 27% of iPhone damage claims are the result of liquid damage, according to a surveyby the insurer Squaretrade. Ordinary cases can’t save a phone from drowning.

After all that, should you buy a case? Loot recommends you take a good hard look at yourself and ask: Am I a klutz? If you are, buy one. If not, just pick up some insurance and let your phone go nude. You know it wants to.


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