Why do I have this? I don't even...

So recently I finally gave up my old Palm Centro and traded up for a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and one of the first things I thought about doing was ordering a new skin for it. I’ve broken this down into two sections for people who don’t like to read: The gist, and the nitty gritty.

The Gist
The Good:

• Cheaper than the rest pricing
• Purchasing through PayPal
• Shipped in given time frame

The Bad:

• A not very professional site: takes some thinking to navigate
• No image size help: didn’t know if the image would turn out fuzzy or not
• Confirmation email vague: No indication of whether or not product has shipped
• No tracking number for most orders
• Color was not as expected: product came out purple looking when my image was blue
• Image was grainy: probably due to no image size help

The Bottom Line:
You get what you pay for. For me, I’d go with someone else.

The Ramble
Last time I ordered any sort of skin (Not-so-new Mobile Phone Skin), I went with a site called Skinit. I didn’t pay much attention to details since the concept of skinning a phone was new to me, so things like image resolution didn’t occur to me when I was ordering and so I used a fairly small image that I already had sitting around on my computer. The site was fairly pricey (even with a coupon) and my biggest disappointment was when the skin arrived, I found a Skinit logo near the bottom of the skin. I would understand them having it if it were a FREE skin, but why would they even think of putting it on a skin I PAID for?! That was a year or two ago so maybe they’ve changed it since then.

Either way, I wanted to try a new service and see how they faired. After some poking around, I decided to go with Unique Skins, mostly due to price. This experience reenforced what everyone and their mother has been telling you since you were born: you get what you pay for.

I guess it’s a personal thing since I work on this kind of stuff, but having a professional looking modern design for a website that I’m buying from would make me feel much better about buying something from a site. The Unique Skins site is fine, but it doesn’t look that up with the time and the interface isn’t that easy to navigate through.

Fine. That’s not what I came here for anyways, so onto the skin editor! Here’s where the important stuff is. Uploading an image is fairly easy, but the one thing that bugs me is that there’s no help on image size. I had no idea if the image file was large enough for the skin because there’s really no way (other than eyeballing it) to tell if your image will come out looking sharp on your skin.

The payment process was pretty straight forward, no complaints there. There were some aspects that could have been better, but if you don’t care about your order after it’s shipped then this next part isn’t a big deal. Got my confirmation email as expected, but there was no confirmation email when the order was shipped and no tracking info included.

The first thing I noticed right off the bat was how red the print out was. The print job was pretty spotty and I could clearly see white spots dotting my skin. Disappointing, but I guess part of that was my fault. Application of the skin was fairly straightforward, but applying an odd looking skin is sort of pointless no?

I’m debating whether or not to take this skin off and try one from Gela Skins. I’ve heard tons of good things about them! Too bad I didn’t have a coupon this time…

Original Article