When the iPhone Pro was announced with the new Camera Control button (don’t call it a button), I chose to buy the first Apple case created by the Beats team, and Steve chose a Spigen case. I reviewed both of them noting their relative merits.
I loved and still love the Beats case. It’s a lovely shade of lavendar, it’s slick and shiny without being slippery and feels great in the hand. It just feels good.
As I noted in my review, I chose the Beats because they designed their case with a sapphire crystal coupled to a conductive layer to communicate finger movements to the Camera Control. Spigen took a different path and simply used a cutaway to allow the user to touch the Camera Control directly.
Over time, I’ve realized that I think the Spigen approach is better. Beats went out of their way to make the Camera Control flush with the side of the case. This makes it harder to find the button quickly. It also makes it easier to hit it accidentally.
The first Beats case I purchased had a very spongy side button (the one that puts the phone to sleep.) I took it back and got a replacement that felt a lot better. I don’t know if it’s changed over time, or whether it wasn’t great to start with, but it feels spongy to me now.
The problem with spongy is it makes it harder to fully engage the button. At night I put my phone on a Belkin MagSafe stand, and the last thing I do is push the side button to put it into Standby mode so it shows me a dimly lit clock. I often have to squeeze the phone more than once to engage Standby mode because the button is spongy.
As I mentioned to Jason in my interview with him about the Torras cases at CES, I add the Anker Magnetic Phone Grip Sandy recommended to the back of my iPhone to give me a nice smooth ring to hold when I’m walking and fooling around on the phone.
I still love the Anker ring but it has two downsides. It makes the phone a lot heavier and thicker, and you have to take it off to use a MagSafe charger. It’s super easy to pop off and put back on, but I have to find a place to put it and not forget to put it back on when I’m done. It’s especially annoying in my car where I have a MagSafe mount and no place to put the ring that won’t slide all over the place.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve scrolled through iPhone case offerings on Amazon looking at the ones that have built-in rings that are also compatible with MagSafe/Qi2 charging. I never pulled the trigger for two reasons. One, I was worried the thin, flat ring would be sharp on my little fingers, unlike the smooth, rounded ring on the Anker. Two, I wasn’t sure how the ring would work as a stand when I needed it.
The Anker ring isn’t a great stand by any means, because it doesn’t tilt the phone very much (maybe 20-30°) but it’s ok.
All of this background explains why I was like a heat-seeking missle going straight to the Torras booth to talk to Jason about their iPhone cases with built-in MagSafe-compatible rings.
In the interview with Jason, I was really struck by the care and pride he took in the designs. There are so many fly-by-night iPhone case manufacturers on Amazon that it’s hard to separate out the ones who take this seriously.
It also gave me a chance to feel the ring and play with how it rotates. Not all of the Torras cases have rotating rings, and not all of them rotate the same way, which was good to understand.
I’m sure you can see where this is going — I bought a Torras case, and I love it. It took a bit of poking around on Amazon to find it, but the TORRAS 360° Spin Stand for iPhone 16 Pro Case is my new love. I bought the violet color and it was not cheap at $46 on Amazon.
Even if this case hadn’t solved the ring problem for me, it has a delightfully clicky side button. I didn’t realize just how much the spongy button on the Beats case was bothering me until I had the satisfying click every single time I needed it.
But the ring is delightful. It’s not as smooth as the Anker to be sure, but it’s not really annoying as I worried it might be. The circle formed by the ring is much larger than the Anker. I’ve had to change how I hold it a bit and find the right rotation point to keep it solidly in my grip while walking.
The ring flips out from the top (and you do have to use a fingernail to get under it.) Once it’s flipped open, the ring rotate around the bottom point of the circle. It clicks firmly into position at 90° increments, which means you know you have a solid position to use as a stand.
The Torras 360° Spin Stand does a much better job as a stand than the Anker ring. It can actually stand the phone up vertically, which would let you use it like a mini-tripod for taking photos or recording videos of yourself. On the Amazon page, they say they tested it for 30,000 rotations! Having met Jason, I believe it
I have to say that being able to just pop it onto the MagSafe charger at my desk, the one at my bedside, and the one in my car without fooling with a separate ring is an absolute delight. I didn’t realize how much I was just accepting as a compromise with the Anker ring.
So it’s got a great ring, it works as a stand, and it lets me charge with less hassle, but there’s one more huge difference that delights me, and that’s the weight. The Torras 360° Spin Stand case weighs 46g, while the Beats case by itself weighs 31g. If you slap the Anker ring on the Beats case, it weighs a whopping 58g. That makes the Torras case with its built-in ring a full 20% lighter than the Beats + Anker ring. That’s a huge benefit to me.
The final advantage is that the Torras case has a built-in, glass Camera Control button but it’s also a cutout so I can find the darn thing. It’s responsive and has a nice click to it. Don’t get me wrong, I still trigger the wrong mode with Camera Control but that’s on Apple for a really weird interface.
Bottom Line
The bottom line is that while the Beats case with Anker ring was my first love, the Torras 360° Ring Stand Case has stolen my heart. It’s lighter, the buttons are clickier, the built-in ring is a better stand and allows me to use MagSafe charging, and I can find the Camera Control don’t call it a button button.