Review: Egrips for Palm Pre 19

The Egrips for Palm Pre easily compensate for one of the biggest gripes with the Pre’s slick river stone design: it is too darned slick. While we all love our shiny gadgets, the Pre - especially with the slippery default back and slider design - is just ripe for falling out of your hand, getting bumped across the table, or slipping off the dashboard. With a simple application to the back, Egrips adds much needed traction to the Pre, allowing it to stay put under most any conditions.

Functionality

So just how well do the Egrips make the Pre grip? Check out the shot to the below - that’s an Egrips-equipped Pre stuck to a sheet of plastic at about 20 degrees from vertical. No tricks, no gimmicks, just straight up stick. Even with moderate shaking it didn’t budge from its mount. After some time with the Egrips I got to be a little more comfortable putting my Pre places that made me nervous, like just sitting on my car’s dashboard or on the table at a restaurant. No matter where I set the phone, it stayed fast. And that’s what Egrips do.

Now, Egrips aren’t sticky; you can hold it in your hand just fine and not feel all slimy when done. More to the point, Egrips is essentially a sheet of silicon suction nodules that suck onto smooth planar surfaces. It’ll work well on a table or car dashboard or other flat things, but not so well on people, pets, or gravel. But then, you shouldn’t be trying to attach your Pre to those things anyway.

There are some caveats to that super-grippiness. Egrips will pick up everything. If you set it down on a dusty workbench, you can expect that the grippy texture will be filled with dust when you pick it back up. Similarly, if you slip an Egrips-wearing Pre into your jeans pocket and pull it back out, it’s going to come out with every bit of lint from inside. Through everyday use most of this stuff will fall off, but if need be a damp cloth can be used to clean the Egrips (just be sure to take off the Pre’s back plate before doing so, water + electronics = bad). The Egrips also won’t work with just about any Pre-sized slip case. While they don’t add much bulk to the Pre (just about 2 mm of thickness), the gripping texture will make it near impossible to insert or remove the phone from a slip case, not to mention that repetitive lateral stress on the Egrips will cause the sheet to delaminate and peel off. Most holsters, like the Seidio Spring Clip Holster, should work just fine. Good news, however, is that the Egrips are 100% compatible with the Touchstone back and charger.

Applying the Egrips to the Pre was a cakewalk. Simply make sure the back surface is wiped clean, peel the Egrips off the packaging, punch out the slot for the Palm logo if you so desire, and align and slowly stick to the back of the phone. Egrips advises that you let the backing sit for a few hours to allow for proper adhesion. Removal of the Egrips is a similarly easy affair: pick an edge and slowly peel it off. Very minimal, if any, adhesive should be left behind, what’s left is easily removed with a dab of rubbing alcohol.

As a final note - the Egrips is thin enough that it can work with the Touchstone. However, it's not very convenient - the Egrips are so 'grippy' that you can't really slide the Pre around on the Touchstone to align the magnets, you have to get it 'just right' when you set it down.

Style

Egrips do add a punch of visual interest to the back of the Pre, but they do also disrupt the smooth river stone design of the phone (but seeing as we want to get away from the smooth, that’s not a bad thing). The hexagonal texture is clearly not a pure grid, but subtle enough that it doesn’t scream geometry. Personally, I’m not a fan of the Egrips aesthetic, but looks aren’t why you would want Egrips. Besides, how often do you or anybody else really see the back of your phone?

Conclusion

If you’re concerned about the overly slick and slippery design of the Palm Pre, you needn’t look any farther than Egrips. From simple application to superior grip, Egrips will give your phone all the traction it needs to stay put under most any circumstances. That grippiness comes with trade-offs, but they aren’t so bad that I can’t recommend the product.

Egrips for Palm Pre are available in the PreCentral Store for $14.95.

Pros

Adds much needed traction

Cons

Picks up everything