There is a shopping wonderland where every item is only about a buck and you can buy pretty much any daily necessity and a whole lot of stuff you didn’t even know existed. This fabled place is the Japanese 100 yen shop, and it’s head and shoulders above the dingy dollar shops you know from home. You can even pick up a stylish cover to pimp your iPhone, with an unexpected abundance of styles and colors to satisfy even the most demanding fashion divas.

Of course, price is one thing, but quality is also going to be a major factor. Can decoration-loving fashionistas really buy with confidence? Can these cheap covers really protect our all-important iPhones? Rocket News decided to find out.

We hit some of the 100 yen shops around Tokyo, and, good grief, what a selection! There were mountains of covers for the iPhone 4. And not just covers, either. We found earphone cord reels, phone stands, and all kinds of other phone-related gadgets and doodads. It’s impressive enough to find iPhone covers at the 100 yen store, but the extensiveness of their lineup really had us floored.

Back at the office, we got to work checking out the quality of our purchases. And the experiments showed…

… they’re pretty darn good! They were really even better than we expected. Sure, there is a slight roughness in appearance, but well within what you would expect from a 100 yen shop. They were all made from either plastic or polyurethane, so they probably aren’t going to provide a huge amount of impact protection, but in terms of preventing scratches and other minor damage, they are definitely effective.

So if you like to change your phone’s accessories depending on your mood, you can feel free with this stuff. You can even pick up some stickers to decorate your new cover. Total cost: just 200 yen. Not too shabby. It’s economical and fashionable, and who doesn’t like that?







[ Read in Japanese ]