M-Edge Leisure Jacket for Apple iPad

With a hard, felt-covered back panel and a transparent, flexible-plastic cover, M-Edge’s $50 Leisure Jacket for iPad would seem to be ideal for situations in which you don’t want your beautiful tablet assailed by surf and sand. But most of the time, it falls woefully short: while the plastic window on the front does indeed let you use the iPad’s touchscreen, it doesn’t fit very tightly, resulting in air bubbles that impede usability. While the case provides cutouts for accessing the iPad's dock-connector port, headphone jack, Sleep/Wake button, and volume controls, they’re really usable only if you unzip the case's front cover. When I did so, I found more often than not the iPad fell out, as it doesn’t sit snugly in the molded backboard. In addition, while the case's zipper might keep out casual water or sand, the case isn't going to provide the kind of protection you get from a truly ruggedized case. At $50, the Leisure Jacket is a bit on the pricey side for what it offers.