iGirl said:
I'm looking for recommendations - on a budget for a REAL LEATHER portfolio type case... So here I am asking if anyone found a real leather case that functions well - doesn't obscure any part of the screen or connectors - and looks really nice/high end. I'm using the iPad as a client presentation tool so impressions are important, and ideally it would be soft and luxurious looking and feeling.
The important distinction to make here is that "real leather" itself is a vague term, as leather comes in many, many grades, from the high-end quality hides to the barely-legal "genuine leather" made of 98% polyurethane bonded to 2% rejected hide.
The best quality leather is top-grain and full-grain leather, and they are expensive because of the amount of effort, time and tanning materials used to prepare them, coupled with the fact that quality craftsmen (whose skill commands a premium) do not work with inferior leathers. In fact, "genuine leather" often is a mid-to-poor quality leather - after all, if a vendor could legally state that they were using full-grain leather, they would say that rather than using a vague term - and is sometimes used to disguise the fact that the material contains synthetics like polyurethane, which also makes the material cheaper, hence the prolificity of $25 "genuine leather" cases on eBay. (Polyurethane is a by-product of petroleum, which is why sometimes items made from this material have a "oily smell.")
That said, my leather cover of choice is Oberon Design (
http://oberondesign.com). Each of their covers are handmade to order in a studio near San Francisco, and feature some remarkable designs hotstamped onto leather. And because it is a top-grain leather, it gets better with age, yet remains impervious to every day wear and tear.
