Much has been said of the Beats iPhone 17 cases due to their fun kickstand. It’s an impressive design, but then you move on to the new Beats Rugged case, which borders on plagiarism, and all the goodwill the company won from me with the kickstand is wiped off the map.
But I have both cases to review, so let’s start with the better one.
The kickstand case
With the strap acting as support, the phone is surprisingly stable.
Surprisingly, this case is the cheaper of the two, with an $80 price tag in Canada. Beyond the interesting kickstand attachment, this price is steep for what you’re getting. The case is extremely standard matte plastic, but at least there is a capacitive sensor for camera control, and it feels nice to hold, albeit a bit slippery.
A subtle magnet is embedded along the right edge of the case between the camera control area and the power button, which makes the kickstand lock into place. It’s a small feature, but that little detail makes it extremely satisfying to use and works better this way. As I was alluding to above, it’s a pretty clever design, and looks cool in a fun, flashy way.
That is, until you start to use it and you realize that it wasn’t tested properly. For instance, if you have screen rotation lock turned on (who doesn’t?) and you go to make a YouTube video fullscreen, it rotates to make the bottom edge of the screen the opposite side of the magnet strip. So to use the case as designed, you either need to turn off rotation lock and twist the phone around until the screen settles where you want it, or you can put the kickstand on the side without the magnet, and it works fine, but is not as seamless.
It seems like Beats is trying to coerce people to keep the kickstand on the right side, since that way, the wrist strap cable works to keep the phone stable. The other way around, it rocks a bit more. That said, once I place it on a table, it’s fine, and I’d rather have the option since the software experience of turning the orientation lock on and off is annoying. You also can’t use this to hold your phone upright in portrait orientation for watching TikTok.
It’s still pretty stable this way, but it rocks back and forth a bit more.
I know a few people who already use wrist straps on their phones, and this one, with its dual purposes, might be the best. However, with its magnet attachment, this model only works perfectly with the Beats case. In other cases, I found Pro Max iPhones were ok, but the iPhone 16, with its smaller design, barely worked.
In the hand, I really like the matte plastic feel of this case. It’s not as glossy as the iPhone 5C-inspired case from last year, but I still really like it. The basic case without the wrist strap feels the same. However, I wouldn’t bank on these for much drop protection—it’s just a simple plastic shell at the end of the day.
The magnet only attaches in this area.
Beats also only sells the case for the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro models, so everyone else is out of luck.
The Rugged case
When I first saw this case, I was blown away by how similar it is to Moment’s Rugged case.
I will concede that the Beats option improves on the design ever so slightly since it has the capacitive passthrough for Camera control, while the Moment iPhone 16 series cases that it’s knocking off did not.
“Hey, can I copy your homework?” “Yeah, just change it a little so it doesn’t look obvious.”
However, Moment’s new iPhone 17 series design remedies this problem. The new Moment cases also move a little bit away from this design, so there’s less overlapping in the market, but I still think it’s poor taste for a company as large as Beats (Apple) to rip this off so closely. After seeing this, I honestly don’t know if the kickstand design was originally a Beats idea anymore.
This case is bulkier than the kickstand version and the bottom half is textured to ensure a solid grip. However, that grip only goes up halfway on the phone, so many areas where you interact with the device don’t feature it.
Beats has decided to carve out a huge section around the Camera Control area, even though it uses a capacitive passthrough button. This is annoying since the carved-out section is so large, so my thumb naturally falls in there whenever I pick up the phone. This has led to even more accidental presses at the top edge of Camera Control than I’ve had with any case before.
I guess this works better if you’re wearing bulky gloves, but without, it’s annoying.
Again, this feels like an area where Beats saw an idea that seemed good on paper, but it didn’t test it, leaving us with a half-thought-out design. In practice, this was so annoying that I had to turn off Camera Control, which I usually have locked to zoom.
Overall, this case is $115 and doesn’t include the kickstand attachment, so for this price, I think you can find a lot of other premium cases that haven’t ripped off a design from someone else. All of that being said, it offers the most drop protection of any Beats case yet.
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