If you have an iPhone, you most likely take it every­where with you, includ­ing vaca­tions and busi­ness trips. It makes sense to pro­tect your iPhone from the vagaries of travel, whether that be a moun­tain bik­ing or white­wa­ter raft­ing trip, a busi­ness trip, or a fam­ily vaca­tion that involves some camp­ing, hik­ing and driving.

Depending on the type of trip you take, there are dif­fer­ent cases that can add func­tion­al­ity to your iPhone and pro­tect it as well. Below are the best iPhone cases we could find that should meet your needs.

Business Traveler

Sena MagnetFlipper Case

I take mul­ti­ple busi­ness trips a year. Most of my time on these trips is spent in air­ports, air­planes, hotels and meet­ing rooms. For these sorts of trips, a sleek, styl­ish case that can be clipped to a belt makes sense.

The Sena MagnetFlipper Case fits the bill nicely.The MagnetFlipper is hand-crafted from Italian Napa leather and pro­vides open­ings for easy access to all of the iPhone’s oper­at­ing func­tions (cam­era, charg­ing, etc.). It also includes a multi-purpose stor­age pocket. The cover is made with a hinged bot­tom and mag­netic fas­tener at the top, allow­ing you to eas­ily flip the cover out of the way with a flick of your thumb for quickly answer­ing phone calls.

The MagnetFlipper Case also comes with a remov­able belt clip sys­tem, allow­ing you to use the case with or with­out a belt clip. The case fits the iPhone snugly, so your phone isn’t going to slip or move around. The MagnetFlipper comes in all sorts of col­ors and styles. I’m a clas­sic black and white sort of per­son, so I pre­fer the sleek, con­ser­v­a­tive black. More adven­tur­ous indi­vid­u­als can choose from col­ors such as Baby Blue, Green and  Orange, or go for the pat­terned Croco look in black, tan or burgundy.

Sena Premium Stand Case for the iPod Touch

If, like me, you own an iPod Touch instead of an iPhone, your pri­or­i­ties are a bit dif­fer­ent. Since you don’t take or make calls on the Touch, hav­ing it clipped to your belt might not be as much of a neces­sity. I typ­i­cally use my Touch for infor­ma­tional things like con­tacts, check­ing email and twit­ter­ing and for enter­tain­ment stuff like lis­ten­ing to music (prob­a­bly the thing I do the least with my Touch, iron­i­cally) and watch­ing video clips and movies.

What I’ve wanted for a while was a nice business-styled case that could also some­how serve as a stand for prop­ping on an air­plane seat tray or hotel desk so that I could watch movies hands-free. The Sena Premium Stand Case is the answer to my prayers.

The Stand Case, like the MagnetFlipper Case above, is hand-crafted from Italian Napa leather. The detail­ing on the case is excep­tional with per­fo­rated leather styling and a slim pro­file to keep the size down. It has a snap enclo­sure and extra padding to keep your Touch safe and sound. It is designed with an open­ing for the back­light sen­sor and pro­vides quick, easy access to the head phone jack and sync and charge port openings.

The cover can be folded back to make a nice stand for the Touch, allow­ing you to prop it up on a rea­son­ably flat sur­face or per­haps a pil­low and watch a movie with­out hav­ing to hold it. This is an espe­cially use­ful fea­ture dur­ing long flights or extended stays in hotels.

Outdoors Traveler

OtterBox Defender

This year we’re plan­ning a fam­ily vaca­tion to cen­tral Arkansas to do some dia­mond and quartz min­ing. While there we’ll be doing some trail hik­ing and explor­ing. A really rugged iPhone/Touch case would be espe­cially use­ful for trips like this.

Enter the OtterBox Defender. The OtterBox Defender offers three lay­ers of pro­tec­tion. The first layer is a thin, clear mem­brane that cov­ers your touch screen to help pre­vent scratches and dings. The sec­ond is a hard, strong poly­car­bon­ate skele­ton that sur­rounds the entire phone. The whole thing is then wrapped in a sil­i­cone skin for  absorb­ing bumps and shocks.

One thing to note is that this case does NOT water­proof your iPhone or Touch.

Despite all this pro­tec­tion, you still have access to the sync and charge ports on the iPhone/Touch. That’s an impor­tant, yet often over­looked fea­ture. Who wants to dis­as­sem­ble a case just to charge the phone every night?

The Defender includes a hol­ster style belt clip and comes in four col­ors: black, white, pink and a black and yel­low com­bi­na­tion that gives the whole thing that adven­ture gear look. Of course I pre­fer the black, but my wife would get the pink one in a heartbeat.

Check out the excel­lent video below from OtterBox on how to assem­ble the case. It’s a great overview of the prod­uct and gives you a good idea of how much pro­tec­tion this case gives your iPhone or Touch.

Speck ToughSkin

Another great option for a ruggedi­zed case is the Speck ToughSkin. Speck makes these for both the iPhone 3G and the Touch. The ToughSkin has a rugged rub­ber­ized case with a dis­tinct, tex­tured pat­tern and thicker cor­ners for extra pro­tec­tion from bumps and drops. Let’s face it, when you do drop your iPhone or Touch, it’s bound to land on the corner.

While the ToughSkin allows access to the head­phone and syncing/charging ports on the bot­tom, it also has a hing­ing mech­a­nism that allows for the bot­tom of the case to swing back­wards, allow­ing you to be able to place the iPhone/Touch on a charg­ing base with­out remov­ing the case. The ToughSkin also comes with a remov­able rotat­ing belt clip/holster that also works as a table­top stand!

The one thing I don’t like about rub­ber­ized cases like the ToughSkin is that they attract dust, lint and hair. This isn’t the best type of case to drop in your jeans pocket or the pocket of a back­pack if you’re wor­ried about it col­lect­ing bits of stuff. It doesn’t affect the func­tion­al­ity of the case or your iPhone, but it can be annoying.

Sport Traveler

Defender Series Armband

Traveling by bike, hik­ing, or doing other stren­u­ous activ­i­ties that may require the use of both hands and no log­i­cal place to hook a phone means you’ll prob­a­bly want an arm­band to strap your iPhone or Touch into.

OtterBox com­pli­ments it’s Defender series case with this nice lit­tle arm­band, allow­ing you to get dou­ble duty out of the OtterBox Defender. Less is more when pack­ing and trav­el­ing, and being able to slip your encased iPhone into an arm­band with­out dis­as­sem­bling it saves you time and effort, both of which you’d rather spend on your excursion.

It’s impor­tant to note that this arm­band will not work with your iPhone or Touch alone. It’s cre­ated as a com­pli­ment to the Defender case, and there­fore has extra room to accom­mo­date the case. It’d be too loose for an iPhone all by itself.

The por­tion that holds the device is made from sil­i­cone and holds the case/device securely to your arm. The arm­band is made from a soft, stretchy mate­r­ial and accom­mo­dates almost any sized arm.

AquaPac Waterproof iPhone Case

If your trav­els involve some white­wa­ter raft­ing, canoe­ing, or maybe just a lazy float on an inner tube down the river, you might want to con­sider AquaPac’s water­proof iPhone case. I always fig­ured water­proof cases were just a more expen­sive equiv­a­lent of a ziploc bag, but I couldn’t be more wrong. For starters, you can make and answer calls directly through the case, with no notice­able dif­fer­ence in call vol­ume. Your GPS sig­nal is also unaf­fected, which is incred­i­bly impor­tant when you’re in back coun­try caught in the pour­ing rain.

AquaPac added some­thing called a LENZFLEX win­dow on the back, which means that you can take pho­tos right through the case.

Does it float? Well, not with the iPhone appar­ently. Since the iPhone is so slim, that appears to cause prob­lems. AquaPac sug­gests that you fold up a few pieces of tis­sue paper and slide them into the case behind the phone and to be sure to test it in a sink or tub before using it out­doors. However, it is guar­an­teed to be sub­mersible up to 15 feet (5 metres).

The UV-stabilized mate­r­ial it is made of won’t break down or be dis­col­ored by sun­light, and it also  keeps dust and sand out, mak­ing it use­ful for lots of out­door situations.

It comes with an adjustable cord so that you can hang it around your neck, and is backed by a three year warranty.

AquaPac Small Waterproof Armband Case

If you’re kayak­ing or are involved in other rugged adven­tures and need water­proof pro­tec­tion for your iPhone, need to keep it hands-free AND more secure than a sim­ple neck strap can pro­vide, you might con­sider the AquaPac small water­proof arm­band case.

This case is a bit larger and isn’t spe­cific to the iPhone only. It doesn’t allow for the pic­ture tak­ing of the above case, but you can still make calls and oper­ate the GPS through the mate­r­ial nor­mally. The added ben­e­fit of the slightly larger size is that this one will float.

The band allows you to attach the case to your arm where you can eas­ily reach it while keep­ing it secure. It can be sub­merged in up to 15 feet of water like the AquaPac iPhone case, and is water­proof and air tight, pro­tect­ing your phone from mois­ture, sand, dust, mud, etc. It does come with an adjustable neck cord as well, just in case you feel like hang­ing it over your shoul­der or around your neck.

I think either of these two AquaPac cases would be great for use on motor­cy­cle trips as well.

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