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Pros

• Inexpensive
• High grade material
• Vast library of top notch designs from top artists
• No bubbles
• Cut to perfection
• Skins both the front and the back
• Provides wallpaper to match skin

Cons

• Once used, cannot be re-used
• Doesn’t come with a Squeegee

TUS Rating:

5 of 5

A whopping 300,000 iPads were sold on it’s first day of sale and in just under 2 years of being in existence, a staggering 25 million iPads have been sold to date. Therefore if you own an iPad, just how would you stand out from the crowd? Sure you could buy a case or a sleeve for the iPad but for anything of any real quality or value, you’re going to have to spend that little bit more out of your wallet. Not to mention the added bulk, weight and that you’re hiding away a beautifully engineered piece of gadgetry inside a plastic or leather case.

Well if you’re looking for a simple, cheap and beautiful option, we’d suggest you take a look at GelaSkins.

Style

With over 100 incredibly talented artists each bringing their own unique and individual style to the GelaSkins library, as well as 22 partnerships that include the likes of Marvel and National Geographic, you’ll have no trouble finding a design that meets your personality. Everything from cartoons to landscapes, monochrome to rainbow designs, the GelaSkins library is certainly very impressive. And if somehow you don’t find something you like, you can always go ahead and make your own too.

In choosing a design to review and feature on the site, we literally had to go over the library over and over, picking out the ones we loved and slowly whittling them down to a single design. Whilst our shortlist started off at around 17 designs, we eventually settled on “Royal Flush” by Nanami Cowdroy who specialises in Japanese black and white painted crane and fish artwork. Absolutely stunning portfolio which I’d urge you all to go and visit even if just for the artistry.

GelaSkins also have over 100 different gadgets which you can skin ranging from your iPhone all the way to your Xbox 360.

Handily for the iPad (and nearly all their devices), they include both the skins for the front and the back of the device. Most the time you only see the back being skinned but with a GelaSkin, you also get the option of skinning the front. If you do skin the front, they will then email you the wallpaper that goes along with it and like magic, the wallpaper and the front skin line up as if it were one piece. Awesome.

All in all, a wealth of amazing quality designs to choose from.

Features

The actual skins themselves are a thin, laminated vinyl decal layer. They’re fully removable without leaving any residue or marks via it’s 3M adhesive backing. However the skin isn’t meant to be reused so don’t go buying batches of these thinking that you can hot swap them around. Whilst GelaSkins have mentioned that they’ve had people successfully remove and reapply the skins, it’s not how they were originally designed.

That said, application of the decal was extremely simple. Simply take the decal out of the hard packaging, peel off the decal and when the decals are all aligned on the iPad, lay it down. Now I know what you’re thinking, what about those pesky bubbles? I’m sure if you’ve shelled out your own hard earned cash for an expensive device, such as an iPad, the last thing you want are any of those annoying bubbles that you always seem to find. But somehow or another, smoothing out the skin once it had been applied was effortless. Although we would have liked a squeegee to come with the skin, even relatively large bubbles could be pushed out without it turning into these horrible crease lines you sometimes get when a bubble is just too large.

But this product is not designed to protect your iPad. Yes it will protect it from scratches or the odd bump as it covers practically every inch of the front and back that’s possible, but it goes without saying that dropping it would be the same as dropping a naked iPad.

Conclusion

The GelaSkin decals are well worth the money if you want to make your iPad (or gadget) stand out from the crowd with one of their amazing designs.

The iPad Gelaskin is available for $29.95 from Gelaskins.

TUS Rating

Style:	5 of 5
Features:	4.5 of 5
Overall:	5 of 5

DISCLOSURE: This product was provided to TUS by GelaSkins. See Contact page for full details on our review policy.