For some reason, my social feeds were flooded last month with ads for phone cases. Perhaps I’d lingered too long over a compelling video or two. Perhaps there’s enough data flowing through all those algorithms to suggest that it was time for a new case for my iPhone. Maybe somehow they just suspected I was about to upgrade to the iPhone 14. For whatever reason, I saw a lot of ads, and one of them caught my eye.
It was something like the image above, although I don’t think this was the exact one. At any rate I thought the case was cool looking. There was a time when cell phones had very cool-looking chromed edges, and this reminded me a bit of that. I parted with a bit of hard-earned coin and waited for it to arrive.
This is not a review
The point here is not to review a phone case, especially one that Solid Signal doesn’t sell. But when I got the thing, I thought ok, this looks better than I thought it would. The outer rim was real metal, something of a surprise. There were cutouts in the right places for the antennas, so I thought perhaps someone gave things some thought. I slapped it on the phone and gave it a try.
At first it was fine. A little slippery, but, fine. But after a few days I started noticing something. My phone, usually pretty happy, had no service. NONE. I mean, how often does that happen. Even in areas served by my cell booster, there were zero bars. ZERO. No one likes zero, do they?
The tale of the meter
Of course I have a lot of measuring equipment so I decided to try to figure out what was going on. The phone’s own test mode wasn’t really helpful, but then again it never is. So what I did was took the case off the phone and taped the inside of the case to the side of the meter’s antenna. I didn’t think this would give me a lot of good data, but it certainly did give me something.
I observed that with the phone case in place, the signal level on the all-important 5G bands dropped by 7dB. That’s a huge drop and it can make the difference between one bar and no bars, obviously. I think the effect might have been exaggerated somewhat since the case wasn’t designed to cover the meter. In order to get real clear results I would have to have essentially gutted a phone. Then, I would have needed to create a makeshift antenna made from the phone’s own antennas, in its empty chassis, and then attach that to the meter. Honestly that’s not a terrible idea and I guess I just need to be on the lookout for a busted iPhone I can use for that purpose. But that’s another article I suppose.
The point?
The point is just to be aware of what you’re putting on your phone. A lot of us still use cases for our phones. It keeps the resale value up and it’s certainly better for those of us who are a little clumsy. But, you can’t just take it for granted that a phone case will be extensively tested to make sure it doesn’t block signals.
In the end, I put a different case on my phone and the problem went away. The case I bought, the one with the slick metal edges, went straight into the trash. The real moral? The next time I need any sort of accessory, I’ll just shop at Solid Signal. I hope you do too. We don’t offer a lot of phone cases but we do offer tens of thousands of things to help you live your best digital life.
