The Iphone Blog

Case maker Sena designs premium handcrafted cases for leather junkies, myself included. Their cases are all of superior quality and come in plenty of designs to choose from, which makes it a no-brainer choice if you are looking for something classy to protect your iDevice. The $69.99 Sarach Flip Leather is no exception.

What’s Good?: The case itself is a piece of art. As you would expect, a lot of thought has been put into the styling of the case. All the classy hand stitching on top of the high-grade leather distinguishes it from the rest. It even has a little card slot hidden in the flap. My corporate-ish dad loves it!

I dropped my phone a couple of times with the case on and it provides great protection from a five foot drop – thank God! Everything is pretty accessible, too; even the holes for the speakers are cut out pretty well.

And did I mention how good the leather smells?

What’s Bad?: There isn’t too much bad about it, although the magnet closure bothered me. I had some issues using the built-in compass with the case on. However, the company assures that these magnets aren’t strong enough to harm the device.

Conclusion: The Sena Sarach Flip Leather case isn’t just another case, it’s a good investment considering the price of $69.99. The quality is amazing and well matches its much-loved competitors such as Vaja – I use one with my iPad. It’s available in several colors, too. I’d recommend getting it if you are not really bothered by the magnetic closure and want to protect your device the right way.

Cult of M ac rated

★★★★½ 

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I’ve used Safari as my default browser since 2008, but lately I’ve decided to give Google Chrome a shot at becoming my new standby. The main reason I chose to give Chrome a chance was that one of the sites I use every day loads like molasses in Safari, yet loads quickly in Chrome.

Since I know some of you are going to mention Firefox, I’ll tell you right now that I’ve ruled it out. It just doesn’t feel right to me. I’ll use Firefox on Windows, but on a Mac it’s just… weird. Feel free to disagree in the comments.

Interface

I suppose Chrome has an attractive interface, but I do think it looks better on Windows, partly because it feels designed for it rather than OS X (look at Chrome’s bookmarks manager and you’ll see what I mean). It just looks better with Aero.

Some aspects of Chrome’s tabs implementation annoy me. Mostly, I’m pretty happy with them, but there are two drawbacks. One being that, because the tabs take up the title bar, there’s less room to drag the window. This isn’t a problem for people who maximize their browser windows, but I like to keep my windows a certain size and I move them around a lot, since I’m always dragging images onto my desktop.

Another side effect of having the tabs in the title bar means that Chrome’s title bar doesn’t really function like one; you never actually see the full title of a web page unless it fits within the tab, which seems like a small complaint, but it’s still annoying.

Features

There were several features I missed from Safari when I switched to Chrome. Probably the one I missed most was Safari’s Reader view, which lets you reformat a long passage of text in an attractive drop-down that cuts out the clutter.

Fortunately, there’s an extension for Chrome that mimics Reader, and actually surpasses it in some ways. The extension’s called iReader and is available in the Chrome extensions gallery. When you hit the arrow keys to scroll through something in Reader for Safari, the cursor doesn’t disappear like it does in normal web pages, but it does in the iReader extension, which is less distracting for me.

Speaking of extensions, there aren’t any extensions I’ve come across for Chrome that aren’t available for Safari, or that I absolutely can’t live without. The opposite isn’t true. In fact, one of the unofficial Safari extensions that I love, ClickToFlash, isn’t available for Chrome, and it looks like that’ll be the case for some time.

Performance

It’s almost a crapshoot here. I can tell you that using Chrome feels faster than using Safari, but only a little. They both use the same rendering engine, WebKit, but they use different JavaScript engines, and from what I’ve learned about both Safari’s Nitro and Chrome’s V8, V8 is superior, but the difference in speed is also small.

On the interface performance side, I’ve noticed that when I have about six tabs open in Chrome, dragging the tabs around gets laggy. I don’t experience this lag with Safari, which I think has the best implementation of tab-dragging in any browser.

Bugs

I can generally say that I’ve experienced more bugs in Chrome than I have in Safari. For instance, in Chrome, almost every time I go back to a Google search result from, say, a Wikipedia page, the page doesn’t display and I’m left with the cute little dead tab face, then I have to re-enter the search in Google. It’s almost a deal-breaker for me.

There are other bugs, of course, but none that are as annoying or pervasive as the above.

Security

Chrome wins here, bar none. Safari is notorious for being a vector of vulnerability attacks, having famously been hacked in just 10 seconds at the annual Pwn2Own contest in 2009, while Chrome was the only browser that wasn’t hacked. However, security isn’t enough to make me switch to Chrome, as there’s very little chance I’d get a virus anyway, since there aren’t many viruses developed for the Mac and I’m a pretty safe surfer.

Will I stay with Chrome?

After using Chrome for a couple of weeks and getting accustomed to all its quirks on the Mac, I’ve decided to switch back to Safari. There just isn’t enough reason for me to stick with Chrome, and the Google search bug mentioned above is a huge annoyance, one that outweighs the poor performance of Safari on the one page that had me considering a switch to begin with.

Did I make the right choice? How’s your experience with Chrome been?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
HTML5′s a Game-Changer for Web Apps
The Real Impact of Facebook’s New Approach to Gaming
Report: Google’s Voice Possibilities

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This week’s apps include a fun way to see if your friends are telling the truth and a line-drawing game that has you hurling axes at approaching bad guys.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

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With the Sonos Wireless Dock you can play all of the music from an iPod or iPhone in every room where you’ve installed a Sonos ZonePlayer. It will be available for $119 beginning by the end of October.

Originally posted at Crave

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Tired of that boring “sent from my iPhone” message that adorns every e-mail you compose? Here’s a free and easy way to spruce up that signature.
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Company enjoys a larger share of overall profits in smartphones than do Nokia, Samsung, and LG combined, even though it sells fewer phones, says a financial analyst.

Originally posted at News – Apple

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