Totallee’s color and clear iPhone 14 cases have arrived, are already on sale for 9to5 readers, and it’s now time for our hands-on review. The brand has been a staple in our yearly best of roundups and is easily one of our favorite clear iPhone 14 cases on the market. But it’s extremely minimalist sensibilities might not be for everyone, so be sure to head below for some hands-on impressions of this year’s case lineup in the latest Tested with gadgetnewsonline feature.
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Hands-on with the Totallee color and clear iPhone 14 cases
Totallee’s color and clear iPhone cases have arrived in the gadgetnewsonline offices. The brand is back again to ensure there are no ugly logos or branding smattered across your gorgeous iPhone 14 while maintaining the look and feel of Apple’s meticulous design, leaving it about as intact as possible without going completely naked.
Thoughtfully designed to offer everything you need in an iPhone case, and nothing you don’t.
They are available in two flavors (with a bonus black carbon fiber option on tap); your choice of six slightly translucent color options or the clear models in soft and hard variations.
Both models fall into the brand’s lauded barely-there category adding just 0.02 and 0.03-inches of heft to the package, respectively. They are also nearly weightless at roughly 0.1-ounces while still delivering slight protective lips around the iPhone 14 display and camera array. MagSafe and wireless charging-ready, “the world’s thinnest iPhone case,” as Totallee puts it, is back once again for folks that don’t require much drop protection and want the Apple design to really shine through.
This protective iPhone 14 case maintains the original look of your iPhone. No branding. No bulk. No nonsense.
Here’s a closer look at the spec sheet:
- Ultra thin and minimal design from 0.02” to 0.03”
- Nearly weightless and no bulk
- Raised lip around camera
- No branding or logos
- Works with MagSafe wireless charging
gadgetnewsonline’ Take
As someone who both doesn’t get out into the woods and very seldom, if ever, drops an iPhone, I have always preferred a thinner and less bulky solution for my Apple handset coverage. While I will flip my case out from time to time depending on the occasion, you will often times find my Apple handset wrapped in Totallee. If I’m going clear, I’m almost certainly going Totallee. If you’re the kind of person who can vividly remember the last few times you dropped your Apple-designed mini mobile internet computer picture-taker, Totallee is likely not the iPhone case brand for you.
I’m also someone that rarely requires the extra built-in MagSafe accessory connection in my day to day life, and in turn, have come to slowly despise the inset magnetic action, mainly due to the MagSafe logo that hides them – I would rather just a solid color case that doesn’t make use of the tired MagSafe ring logo when needed. Fortunately, the super-thin Totallee approach works nicely with MagSafe charger solutions and wireless charging anyway – although you might not want to have one mounted on one of those floating solutions if there’s a chance it would fall farther than a few inches or so after getting accidentally bumped.
Totallee’s entirely branding- and MagSafe logo-free approach has always appealed to me, and even more so this year.
There are some brands out there that manage to keep branding on the more appealing and minimalist side of things, but Totallee entirely eschews the need to plaster its name or a MagSafe circle across my most important piece of EDC, and I have grown to appreciate this choice more and more with both is color and clear iPhone 14 cases.
The clear soft model has always been a highlight in the lineup for me, delivering a gummy and flexible cover that’s soft to the touch, easy to get on and off, and it fits great. While some folks seem to say the Totallee cases do indeed yellow at some point, I have never experienced this. I have a 13 series clear case here, and it is still entirely clean with zero signs of yellowing – the same goes for iPhone 12, although that one hasn’t been in circulation out in the sun for about a year now. It provides all but zero drop protection, but if that’s what you’re after Totallee isn’t really the brand for you anyway, and it does offer a “hard clear” case for a little bit more protection against bumps and light drops.
The sort of frosty, semi-translucent color case delivers a less gummy and soft construction than the clear option, but are still quite flexible and are even slightly thinner all around than the clear options. The other main difference here is that the color models do not feature button covers like the soft clear iPhone 14 case model. This means the iPhone 14’s volume buttons, for example, are entirely exposed allowing the color of your buttons to pop through the case leaving the clicky feel of exactly as Apple intended. This can result in some interesting color combinations allowing the iPhone 14’s colorway to pop out around the camera array cutout and around the buttons.
Anyone who has taken a quick browse around the interwebs for the best clear cases or something with an extremely minimalist, barely-there approach will have already bumped into Totallee, and for good reason. We selected the brand as the top clear case out there in last year’s best iPhone 13 cases of the year feature, and at this point, they are a strong front runner once again.
As per usual, the only real sore spot for me, and likely most potential Totallee customers, is the price point. For some folks, despite my mostly glowing review, paying $39 for a barely-there, 0.1-ounce piece of plastic is a pricey proposition. But worry not, this is gadgetnewsonline and you should (almost) never have to pay full price for a Totallee case. Head over to the brand’s official Amazon storefront and apply code FOURTEEN40 to knock 40% off your order. More details on that can be found right here.
Buy Totallee color and clear iPhone 14 cases
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