Finding a case for your PDA…. Easy. Finding a nice case for your PDA…. A little harder. Finding a beautiful case for your PDA…. Well, you know where this is going. So as not to rip off a certain credit card companies ad campaign I’ll stop right there.

What makes a case beautiful? Well, we know that there are lots of leather cases on the market, of varying quality. They range from slipcovers to sync-in-case flip-tops, and from soft plush leather to very sturdy harder leather.

On my quest for cases, I’ve been to several sites, and on many boards I kept hearing of Vaja, so I went to check them out. Vaja is a designer case maker with some very unique designs. I talked to one of their marketing people who was more than generous to send me three review samples.

The cases that I received were a black classic iPAQ 3800 case, a brown magnetic closure Jornada case, and one of the new iPAQ 3800 i-Volution cases.

I’ll break them out here and tell you what I thought of each one after using them for a while.

Classic Series for the iPAQ 3800.

Upon opening up the box for the classic iPAQ case, I was greeted with something nice… the great smell of leather. It was so good actually, that I felt like I was in a leather shop, or maybe standing by the belt rack at Nordstrom. The case has textured leather on the front, and a very smooth, shiny outer surface all the way around. It looks very much like a nice set of shoes as far as the deep black and the shine goes.

I opened it up and on the inside of the case on the back panel, there is a short statement by Vaja about the case. Sort of a mission statement. It reads:

“This case ahs been designed by a group of PDA enthusiasts, and made by a skilled craftman following the highest quality standards of the leather industry taking care of every detail in each of its almost fifty processes. Only the top ten percent of the Argentine leathers are selected for its quality, tack and durability, to be able to offer comfort and service during its natural lifetime utility.”

That’s some detail. As far as features go, the case is not lacking. It is very well designed and fitted to the 3800, allowing easy access to all features, but still keeping a good grip. The seams are very nicely done, and there are no little burrs or snags at corners. There are two business card slots, and two SD holder slots, and both work quite well. The case has a snap closure and a metal Vaja logo to top it off.

One thing for a feature that some people would miss would be the option for a belt clip or other attachment mechanism. I think that this is a case for style rather than just a way to carry your iPAQ and didn’t see this as a drawback. Actually the opposite on another case you’ll see in a few minutes.

Overall this is an excellent case, both by design, materials, build quality, and fit. I was skeptical of the prices on the site at first, but once you handle one of these cases it makes sense. The case without belt clip runs $65-75 and with the belt clip is $69-79.