Design – A Brick phone(case) that is not from the 90s!

Snow Lizard SLXtreme is the largest case we have reviewed for the iPhone 7. It takes your relatively svelte iPhone 6s or 7 and turns it into a giant plastic brick. There’s almost no way for you to keep this case in your pant pocket easily. From a bulk and weight perspective, the Snow Lizard SLXtreme nearly broke our scoring system.

The Snow Lizard SLXtreme case fits together quite well. There isn’t anything on the case that stood out iSn terms of coming apart. The front of the Snow Lizard SLXtreme won’t slide around easily. The backside, on the other hand, will most likely stay put depending on the angle of the surface you’ve put it on.

Installing your iPhone is simple. You only have to do is unclip the bottom and slide in your iPhone. Removal is also equally as simple. Snow Lizard designed the bottom to have clip that will slide the iPhone out.

From a wear and tear perspective, the case will hold up well over time since the majority of the corners are covered in rubber. But there are a couple of places where there is hard plastic which might scratch during a bad drop. Our iPhone 5 version of the case actually came apart after a couple of drops, something we didn’t notice when we are testing the case before.

The texture of the case is surprisingly nice given the bulk of the case. There is a lot of things happening on the case so your fingers always have something to hold onto. This is going to be important if you have the larger iPhone 7 Plus case.

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Protection – Secure enough even with a battery and solar panel in the back

The Snow Lizard SLXtreme is waterproof with a drop-rate of 6.6 ft. It is not as tough as other cases due to the solar panel and spare battery attached to the case.

We personally wouldn’t use the SLXtreme as a waterproof case to capture snorkelling footage due to it’s bulk. It is not really impossible to do. But you would be better off with something like the HitCase Pro or ProShot for this type of activities. With that being said, we have no problem actually getting the case wet or watching it get thrown into water.

The screen protector is made from plastic and the edges of the case are high enough to easily keep the screen off a flat surface.

We dropped the Snow Lizard SLXtreme several time on a regular sidewalk and the case held together quite well. We also tested how long would the bottom latch stay together. After two drops, the latch stayed on.

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Functionality – Aside from the typical sound problem, this case delivers

The Snow Lizard SLXtreme mutes the sound coming from the iPhone. But the sound it produce is better than the Ghostek Atomic and most waterproof cases,

Screen access isn’t terrible as the screen sits on the iPhone quite well. We didn’t run into many instances where the screen sensitivity was noticeably reduced. There was no diffusion either. One of the things that did surprise us was the camera cutout. We totally thought the thickness of the case was going to get in the way of the flash but to our surprise, it doesn’t. To access/charge your iPhone, you’ll need to use a Micro-USB cable (Snow Lizard does provide one) and you can sync your iPhone through the port.

Thee is also a place for a wrist strap which is going to be handy when you’re out and about with this behemoth of an iPhone case.

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The Solar-Powered Spare Battery

When it comes to the spare battery, Snow Lizard has put a 4000mah battery into the Snow Lizard SLXtreme. According to their site, this will provide you with an extra 185% more battery power which is quite significant. You could almost go an entire week without charging your iPhone 7! To charge your iPhone, all you have to do is press the button. However, we wish Snow Lizard grants its users to be able to know the battery status in the battery widget

In addition to the spare battery, the Snow Lizard SLxtreme comes with a built in 20% monocrystalline solar panel. The spare 4000mah battery is actually consistently being trickle charged by the solar panel.

The Snow Lizard SLxtreme has LED’s at the bottom of the case. The LED will show either blue or green with green meaning the solar panel is receiving a decent amount of sunlight. The more green dots you have, the more solar energy being converted into power for your iPhone. The most amount of dots that we got were three.

The solar panel will charge 10 mins of talk time for one hour in the sun. Based on our calculations, Snow Lizard SLXtreme needs 84 hours of sunlights to fill in an iPhone 7 that has 14 hours of talk time.

We’re located in Calgary so we get about 9 hours of sunshine during the summer which means it would take 9 days to fully charge the battery. We left the Snow Lizard SLXtreme outside for 6 days and got 3 Blue LED’s. So it is safe to assume that you need 6 + days to fully charge that spare battery.

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