The Gadgets Page

You can make your iPhone whatever color you want if you are willing to send it to Colorware for weeks on end and shell out $150 to $200 extra. You could also buy your iPhone from Colorware and they will send it to you fully customized.

• Customized ColorWare iPhone

Everyone is commenting on this. You can see some examples of what people have imagined for their own phones here:

• Shiny Shiny: ColorWare will paint your iPhone pink. Or green, or yellow, or … you get the idea.

• Colorware Now Offering iPhone Paint Jobs | Gear Live

• iPhone gets 29 new shades from Colorware – Engadget

My problem with this is the dock. You can pay extra to have your dock colored as well, but that just reminded me of the iPhones I’ve been oggling at the Apple Store. The display iPhones have been constantly manhandled and squished back into their docks for three weeks now and quite a few of them are scratched along the bottom because of it. With an extra layer of paint from Colorware, will the iPhone even FIT into that snug dock anymore?

One other caveat: Doing this to your iPhone may void your warranty with Apple. According to Colorware’s website:

ColorWare Inc. is not an authorized reseller of Apple Inc. products. ColorWare Inc. replaces all existing Apple Inc. warranty policies and procedures with a ColorWare Inc. warranty, the documentation for which is included with all products purchased from ColorWare Inc.

That’s for the products that are sold through Colorware, but if you send in your iPhone, you may just kiss those Apple Genius’ goodbye.

I really like the look of that red iPhone, but I think I’ll pass. The image of scratched red paint is not appealing at all.