Like most cases of gentle entropy, it happened very slowly. But after about a year and a half it was very difficult to ignore that the rubberized corners didn’t fit properly anymore, the grippy texture had faded to slickness, and the port covers had disappeared aeons ago. The once perfectly black hue of it all had faded into a sort of nondescript grey-ish.
It was time to buy a new Otterbox.
I absolutely adore the Otterbox Defender. It takes me back to a time when premium materials took second place after the amazement of carrying a phone in your pocket. When you dropped your phone and it was the floor who should’ve been afraid. Sure, it transforms today’s metal and glass miracles of engineering into something that looks overall more…“work-oriented”. But it’s preferable to lament the fact that you don’t look particularly stylish instead of your incredibly stylish and increasingly expensive sculptured computer ending up as useful as the broken shard of screen that fell off of it when it hit the ground.
So the new case arrives in the mail, serving in every way to highlight how much the old one had loosened and worn down since purchase. Still, that wear meant that removing it was a breeze, even if the plastic clips of the inner hard plastic cover had seemingly averted the fate of the rest of the case. It was when I tool it apart that I realized a couple of things.
The biggest one was the realization you see as the title of this post. It rationalized itself as the more accurate “I’ve touched my phone maybe three times since I bought it” but the statement may as well be 100% true. Between the Otterbox and the tempered glass protector that made sure the crack across the middle of the screen is a cheap annoyance rather than a phone-breaking catastrophe; the only times I actually make contact with the phone are because of necessity. So it was as I cleaned the dust that had accumulated in patterns that perfectly accumulated to make a perfect outline of the openings of the case. And once that was done, back it went into the new otterbox to not be seen again unless this one wears out or I decide to swap phones and store this one without a case for some weird reason.
The entire episode makes me consider devices like the Galaxy XCover pro. It’s a phone that doesn’t need a cover and comes with all of the features that people who are really passionate about phones say they want on their phone. Headphone jack, removable battery, and durable (in sacrifice to premium feeling) materials? All present and correct. Good luck seeing one in public though. Yes, I am part of the problem, apparently.
Hopefully, it will be a while for me to have another one of those realizations. With ever-longer support windows and better batteries, I believe it’ll be a while longer yet. Maybe I’ll also forget the second discovery by then.
I own a black phone. I had honestly forgotten about that.
