Tech 21 is a company that I’m still sort of waiting to take off in the US, and it seems that I have to continue waiting. I was thoroughly impressed with the notebook products they sent me a year and a half ago –so much so that I was really shocked that seemingly no one had gotten around to using, let alone reviewing them. It was a refreshing upgrade to a product that was relatively worthless at what it was supposed to do. (In case you are wondering, the product in question is Incase’s Neoprene Sleeves, which do about zero in terms of impact protection, the feature I feel confident saying most people want.) So, a few months ago when Tech 21 reached out to me to see if I’d be interested in their iPhone cases, I was hoping for a lot.

While I haven’t done very many iPhone 4 case reviews (in fact, I believe this is review number two since the device first came out), I have owned a few cases outside of my trusted Ballistic Case and I continue to be disappointed by the lack of innovation that seems to exist in what has to be a huge market. I don’t think that I would have thought mobile phones would be necessarily where they are at today when the iPhone first debuted, but I definitely would have expected iPhone cases to make advances beyond Incase’s Slider. The Impact Mesh for iPhone 4 isn’t really doing much appearance-wise in terms of breaking boundaries, but inside, Tech 21 continues to rave about their D30 shock absorption, which is essentially what this is a review of, believe it or not. Continue reading →