on preorder now through Kickstarter<\/a>, with a full retail price of $129 and pricing for backers listed at $79. But I have some real hesitations recommending it even at the discounted early bird rate. For starters, it\u2019s bulky. I\u2019m working very hard here to overcome my biases: I don\u2019t usually use cases, and I\u2019m fresh from a couple weeks of using the iPhone Air. This case on the iPhone 17 Pro was always going to feel unwieldy to me. Still: I think it is unreasonably big. You do get a built-in microSD card slot, which is nice. It meets the UHS-I, Class 10, U3, and V30 standards, meaning that you should be able to record 4K video directly to the card without dropping frames provided that you have a fast enough card.<\/p>\nMy biggest complaint with the Selfix is that it just doesn\u2019t do the job very well. The screen is a circle with a 1.6-inch diameter, so it naturally cuts off a big chunk of the rectangular preview image on your main phone screen. It also has some real chunky bezels, so the usable screen area is a little smaller than the inside of a paper towel tube. All of that means there\u2019s still some guesswork involved; if you frame your face in the center of the rear screen you\u2019ll get a selfie with a lot of blank space above your head.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s an awful lot of guesswork still involved<\/p>\n
The Selfix\u2019s screen is touch-sensitive, but I couldn\u2019t get tap-to-focus to work consistently. The unit I tested is labeled as \u201cBeta,\u201d which may be the culprit here. You need to use the volume keys on your iPhone to take a photo or start video recording anyway, because the part of the screen with the virtual shutter button is cut off. It\u2019s also kind of unsettling shooting video and not seeing any indication that recording has started. For something that\u2019s designed to reduce the guesswork of using the rear cameras, there\u2019s an awful lot of guesswork still involved.<\/p>\n
Then there are the side effects. The case allows for passthrough wired charging, but no data connections, meaning no wired CarPlay or transferring files to your laptop over USB. There\u2019s a magnetic ring in the back of the case so you can keep using MagSafe accessories, but no wireless charging. You need to take the case off to do any of these things.<\/p>\n
On top of all that, it\u2019s pretty easy to forget the rear screen is turned on when you\u2019re done taking your selfies. As a reminder: It mirrors whatever is on your phone screen, so you could wind up giving the rest of the world a clear view of your banking app or whatever you\u2019re looking at. There\u2019s a dedicated button on the side of the case to turn the screen on and off, and when it turns on you\u2019ll see a little USB plug icon in the Dynamic Island to let you know an accessory has been plugged in. But there\u2019s no persistent onscreen reminder that the case is mirroring the display, and I can see that going wrong in some unfortunate ways.<\/p>\n
Look, I love a weird phone accessory. And I appreciate the Selfix case trying to do more than one thing \u2014 help you use the rear cameras for selfies, expand your phone storage, and protect your device. I just wish it did its main job better.<\/p>\n
Photography by Allison Johnson \/ The Verge<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Selfix phone case is a classic example of a great idea in theory that falls apart in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":368342,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[356,8663,342,111,139,69,763,370,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-368341","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-gadgets","9":"tag-hands-on","10":"tag-mobile","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-reviews","15":"tag-tech","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368341\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/368342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}