2024 was phone upgrade year for me, moving from my iPhone 13 Pro to a 16 Pro. New phone also means new case, and I have become accustomed to having a wallet/folio case. For my 13, I was using the Decoded Leather Wallet case (no affiliate links, and I have received no compensation from any mentioned company), whose primary virtue was that it left the bottom edge of the phone unencumbered. Not unlike at least one of the ATP guys, I really don’t care for interference on my up-swipe. You can see in the product photo that Decoded thinks the case also works as a stand; I had, at best, 10% success when attempting that maneuver.
Okay, so I obviously want whatever they’ve done for the 16 Pro, right? Sadly, no, I do not. Decoded has chosen to introduce not only a bump on the lower edge, but also a strap. They have further chosen to make the wallet “detachable,” which does not appear to add much, if any, value for me (more on that later).
So, what to do? For a start, I turned on AppleCare+ so as not to push my luck carrying around a phone with no protection. Next, because I couldn’t see anything that checked all my boxes (no strap, not detachable, and no swipe interference), I compromised on the last of those and went for the Nomad Goods Modern Leather Folio. Note that this one does have a strap, but that strap is detachable (and the case is shipped with it detached), so is not a negative for the case. And it’s … fine. It did confirm that I really do not like the bottom-edge bump, though, so I kept looking.
Next up, the Geometric Goods Minimalist 1.0. Definitely no issues with swipe or button access on this one, as the phone is attached to the case (such as it is) magnetically. “Let’s give it a shot,” I thought to myself, having recently heard on some podcast or other that modern Popsockets attach magnetically and securely. Aaand first day in the field, as I folded it over to slide a receipt into the wallet, my phone fell on the table. So, no, let’s not do that. (Side note: a cat who lives at my house found the Geometric Goods case to be a very likely chew toy, in a way that he has not found any other case before or since)
Lastly for this phase of the search, I opted to compromise on detachability (at least in this case, the detachable part is still protecting the phone) and went for the Blackbrook Burkley Detachable Wallet case, only to find that I missed/ignored the subtle hints in the imagery that indicate the presence of a strap, which turns out not to be detachable. Furthermore, with my phone in the case, closing the strap and putting it in my pocket activated the camera two out of two times (and I already changed the camera button to require a double-click because I was picking it up wrong so often, so I’m a bit puzzled how it happened). Add that to the fact that the attachment of the inner case to the wallet was disappointingly unstable, and I’m back to the Nomad for now.
If anybody has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.