I bought my girlfriend an iPhone for Christmas and ever since we’ve been trying to find the perfect case for her. I tested several different models from the good people at pdair.com, always a “go-to” source for iPhone swag.

Specifically, we looked at:

The black leather flip case

The pink leather flip case with snap

and the red crocodile pattern leather flip case

Here’s a detail of the attractive croc print.

Each case had its pros and cons. Although the black and red cases appeared to be exactly the same design, somehow the pattern used to cut the leather must have been a little different. The black case always closed securely with just a little thumb pressure to fit the face cover snugly into the slot that surrounded and protected the rest of the iPhone. The red case however had a tendency to pop open, leaving my girlfriend look like she was preparing to contact Scotty and ask him to beam her up from the surface of some strange world.

While this might have been deemed as a feature for a geek like me, to a style queen like my girlfriend, it was a deal breaker. All three cases offered easy access to the various buttons and features of the iPhone while offering suitable protection for the most expensive piece of electronics I’ve ever purchased that didn’t have a cord plugged into the wall.

I have to say that the pink case seemed the most unwieldy to me. The snap was awkward to close and the leather was stiff and hard to adjust to get a proper fit around the phone. The whole package seemed bulky in my pocket and took away from the sleek beauty of the iPhone. But the stitching was precise and attractive and it really looked like something Charlotte would carry in “Sex in the City.”

I had heard that some leather cases can actually serve to degrade the signal of certain phones, so I did a test of signal strength of all three cases. The black and red cases demonstrated no loss of signal or any increase in dropped calls. My girlfriend did complain of bad reception and dropped calls when using the pink case, and sure enough the phone consistently registered one bar less when inserted in that particular case.

All three cases would be acceptable solutions for protecting your iPhone investment, and PDAir offers quite a wide variety of well-made products. In the end it should probably come down to personal preference as to which case best fits your needs. For me, I thought the black leather case was the best overall in both looks and performance.

My girlfriend? She chose the pretty pink one. Just goes to show what I know…

All three of these cases are available from pdair.com.

MSRP: Black Leather Case $35.00
Pink Leather Case $28.00
Red Crocodile Case $38.00

What I Liked: Stylish design. Good construction and stitching.

What I Didn’t Like: Some signal loss. Stiff leather required extra effort to achieve proper fit.