Windows Phone Thoughts: A Journey Down Under: nSignia PDA Cases Reviewed

Just Another Leather Case?
So what makes nSignia's PDA cases unique? Not all leather cases available in the market are handmade, but nSignia's cases are! With that in mind, you can expect a higher level of quality and care put into each case that comes off the production line. This is one of the main reasons why nSignia back their cases with a lifetime guarantee against defects in materials and workmanship.

You will notice a feature of the case (as seen in Figure 3 and 4) that make it stand out from most others. Instead of the typical application button cutouts you would expect in most cases, nSignia have adopted small metal rivets which "push-through" and activate the buttons when they are pressed. This is great for people who have larger fingers and have trouble fitting them through typical button cutouts. I had one problem with these innovative rivets though. Apart from personal information management, I, like most others, also use my Pocket PC as a personal media player, and because of this, I like to keep my Pocket PC in the case, closed, and in my pocket. Within the first two weeks of use, the case was still relatively new meaning the leather was still very tight. As a result of this, when I closed the case, some applications buttons were prone to being accidentally pressed and if you're like me and you map your application buttons to specific functions in your media player, you can easily see where this might be a problem. Thankfully, as I gave it a couple more weeks, the leather started to wear in, thus adopting to the contours of the Pocket PC. The final result? The problem disappeared! I can now close the case and leave it in my pocket without having to worry about my media stopping halfway. I spoke to Graham about this and he recognised it as being a potential problem. He spoke of possible changes to the shape of the case to help prevent it from occurring in the future, so we'll see how these changes develop over time.


Figure 3: The case allows for painless cable connectivity.

The case also has open spaces for the D-pad, infrared port, card slot, stylus and even the soft-reset button meaning that you don't have to take your Pocket PC out just to use those specific features of the device. There is also room at the bottom of the case for the synchronisation cable to insert into (as seen in Figure 3). I'd lament over a PDA case that only holds the device itself, and thankfully, nSignia's products don't fall in that category. The case I reviewed had slots to house two additional SD cards and three credit/business cards. It also featured one multi-purpose slot that's great for storing a mini-notepad. All-in-all, there's not much to fault in the design of the case.


Figure 4: Open wide. Come inside!