Chima Crucial Case

Is it a bag or an iPad folio case? It’s both! The $60 Crucial Case from Chima Design manages to be both a floor wax and a dessert topping. Made of black, ballistic nylon, the case definitely feels more like a bag than the leather-clad cases that populate most of the iPad folio-case category.

To secure your iPad, you place it into the case’s nylon-clad frame and then zip up the case. Unfortunately, the case covers all buttons and ports on the iPad, save for the Home button. There are two zipper pulls on the case, so you could theoretically adjust the zippers in order to make a particular port or set of ports accessible, but it’s still a design that makes the Crucial Case more appropriate for protecting an iPad while traveling than for actually using it.

The case’s back cover has a kickstand so you can flip the front cover around and place the iPad on a hard surface for viewing videos or slideshows in landscape mode. The case also comes with a special Velcro attachment that lets you attach it to a car headrest for using the iPad as a backseat entertainment system. (Chima also points out that the Crucial Case is designed to hang from a closed airplane tray table.) There are even storage pockets to tuck in a few small objects.

Given its non-rigid nylon construction and no-ports-accessible zipper design, the Crucial Case feels more like a case to carry your iPad in than a case to use your iPad in. If the Crucial Case came with a clip-on shoulder strap, it might be a nice “tweener” of a product. As it is, it’s a bit too much of one and not enough of the other.