Slippery devices will stick with colorful custom grips

by Shawn Barnett

Posted November 20, 2003

Most electronic gadgets today are designed to look cool. This usually means they have slick bodies that look great-and slide right out of your hand. It's a criticism especially made by men with working hands, rough and lacking the stick many are used to; even so, even the stickiest hands have trouble holding onto a small device like the Sony Ericsson T68i. I was just about to go get some sandy grip tape from the local hardware store, like the kind I used on my skateboard as a kid, when I discovered Egrips at an Apple store. These are rubbery little grips that are cut for a large variety of devices. It so happened that they had one for my T68i and Palm Tungsten T, so I ordered them. Not bad.

I shouldn't have picked the elephant skin pattern for the T68i. I just couldn't resist the contrast it offered; now I can. It would have gone great with my Siemens S46, though. Regardless of its appearance, it sure does give the little device better grip, and far less of a tendency to slip out of my hands. And it sticks to other surfaces very well, staying in place even up to 45 degrees and beyond. With my headset attached, I set my T68i on my curved dashboard for better reception. Hard stops, fast cornering, and bumps don't remove it from its place. Pretty amazing. I find I think differently about my devices, more sure that they'll stay put when i set them down. It's a good feeling.

Egrips cautions that you shouldn't push an Egrips-equipped device across a surface, because you might just pull the grip from the adhesive. That's how good this stuff grips. It doesn't absorb oil, nor does it gum up with dirt. I did notice a little fuzz sticking to the adhesive on my T68i after I'd set it on my cloth car seat. But it didn't stick to the grip surface, just as they promise. Finally, it doesn't gum up your device if you decide to remove it. All adhesive removes cleanly. Egrips even seems to suggest that you can swap them for fashion's sake. For the price, some might just be tempted: US$9.95, plus US$1 for dimpled, then another dollar for colors and textures. http://www.egrips.com

-Shawn Barnett

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