Track tech
Some apps and gadgets that can help us watch over our children.
IF YOU haven’t heard of the name Otterbox before, the company is actually well known for producing hard travel cases for all kinds of sensitive electronic equipment — from professional videocamera equipment to PCs and laptops.
For a while now, though, Otterbox has also been producing ruggedised cases for almost any name-brand smartphone out there, from iOS to Android to BlackBerry devices.
The Defender is a popular model in the Otterbox line and the company has just introduced a design that fits the iPhone 5.
This casing is designed to give “triple” protection, in that there is a soft inner foam layer that the iPhone sits on, a hard impact resistant middle layer, and finally, a soft silicone outer layer.
As such, the casing is pretty bulky — with the whole thing properly installed, your formerly slim iPhone 5 will go from Bruce Banner-like proportions to the full blown Hulk, with the same corresponding increase in toughness, I’ll wager.
Installing the casing itself is not as straightforward as it seems unless you’re familiar with the Defender series.
To install the iPhone, you have to first peel off the silicone outer layer, and that requires some doing — a quick look at the supplied instruction booklet shows you just how to do this, but even so, it’s not that easy since the fit is quite tight.
Once that’s removed, however, it’s much easier to unlock the second layer and then install the iPhone inside.
Oh yes, the Defender also comes with a separate belt clip holster which doubles up as a kickstand for propping up your iPhone in landscape mode.
Again, it wasn’t immediately clear how to enagage the kickstand — and after another quick glance at the user guide, I realised that all you need to do is open the belt clip as far as it will go till it locks into position.