It's one of the great ironies in modern technology: progress keeps rushing us towards smaller and thinner, lighter and more flexible, but every step in that direction makes our gizmos more fragile. Think about your friends with smartphones. How many live with a cracked or shattered screen because they can't afford to replace it? How many laptops have defects because they've slipped off a desk or someone's put too much weight on it when closed?

The Apple iPad is a beautiful example of this conundrum. The latest iPad 2 is an amazing feat of engineering, so thin and light that it's almost unbelievable that it can be so powerful with that footprint.

But drop it even two feet from a table onto a tile or concrete floor and you'll be heading to the Apple Store for a replacement, grumbling all the way.

Apple makes an iPad case but its Smart Cover is more about protecting the glass surface than protecting the entire device from any sort of fall, which is a problem. As much as I want to tote around my iPad without any protective cover at all, it's a risky business.

The purpose of cases are to protect and so it should be no surprise to find out that plastic protective cases for laptops and phones get dinged up and scratched. The advancement in plastic materials, however, and ability to pour just about any color or finish seems to have let manufacturers leap too far ahead and produce products that are remarkable both in their attractive appearance and their fragility.

In this piece I'll talk about two that I've been using for the last month or two: A Speck Products See Thru Macbook Air case and an iFrogz 3G Luxe iPhone case

I've gone through an amazing number of iPhone cases in the last year or so, between the ten or so I reviewed for the first gen iPhone and the cases I've been sent for the newer 3G phone. At first, my iPhone cases of choice were the rubberized ones like those from InCase Designs. (they call it a "form-fitting, injection molded material", of course, but to me it's just a fancy sort of rubber)

Then I realized that since I like to slip my iPhone into the front pocket of my pants, I'd often end up with the case collecting lint. Not so good, so I moved to harder plastic shells, but didn't really find any that I loved. Well, I like the Griffin Wave for its mix and match capabilities, but not enough that I haven't kept looking.

Until iFrogz generously gave me a couple of their 3G Luxe cases. What can I say, these just ROCK!