Slab-Like iPhone Case Hewn From Solid Metal

Every morning my inbox is almost full of pitches for various iPhone cases. Gel skins and anodized pictures of sock monkeys are today’s offerings. They are almost always humdrum, and usually virtual clones of one another, probably all starting life in the same Chinese factory.

But the Exovault is different, and not just because no PR company has (yet) pitched it to me. The chunky metal box is possibly the most impractical iPhone case ever seen, the rear fins looking like the hefty heat-sinks found on a 1980s-era CD player (back when we still said the words “compact disk”). Those fins are in fact slots which will let the precious radio waves reach the phone within, and there are similar industrial-looking cutouts for the home button, dock connector and other essentials.

The case comes in brass, aluminum or titanium and each is made from two chunks bolted together in the designer’s Brooklyn factory. The titanium model is $300, but the others are a more reasonable $95 apiece. We think they’re fantastic. Ridiculous, silly, impossibly squared-off and completely pocket-unfriendly, yes, but fantastic all the same. In fact, if I had designed a cellphone back in my school days (long before such things existed outside of Star Trek), it would have looked exactly like this.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/07/slab-like-iphone-case-hewn-from-solid-metal/