Replace your boring old case with a customized Nexus ‘Live Case’ from Google

By Christian de Looper April 14, 2016

nexus live case contest

While you can often choose the outside color of your phone, that’s about as far as you can go when it comes to customizing your phone’s look. Sure, you can buy a case for it, but even those are pre-designed and may not capture the essence of what you’re all about.

Not anymore! Google has launched My Live Case, a service that allows all you Nexus 5X, 6, and 6P owners out there to create your own snap case with a favorite photo or map.

In making your very own case, you start with a photo or favorite place. You’ll then be able to apply one of a number of different filters to your case to give it the look you want — bright and fun, or classy and sleek. Along with the case, Google will even give you a live wallpaper for your phone to compliment the case and complete the design.

Once you snap on your shiny new case, which has an NFC tag built in to it, your wallpaper will turn to a slideshow of a number of photos that you chose from Google Photos. You can add photos to that slideshow by simply tapping a shortcut button on the back of your case, which will open the camera app. If you chose to go with the Places Live Case rather than the Photos Live Case, the shortcut button on the back will take you straight to Maps and show you what’s nearby, according to Google’s blog post.

It’s certainly an interesting idea to have a shortcut button, which Google says is programmable, on the case itself. While there are customizable cases out there by third-party companies, few of them come with a button like that, and none of them are obviously officially made by Google. The cases cost $35 each. You can start making your case here.

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Christian de Looper

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Christian’s interest in technology began as a child in Australia, when he stumbled upon a computer at a garage sale that he…

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