If you have a cellphone, you carry it with you everywhere, so you might as well make it do double duty as brass knuckles, right? Who really has the pocket space to carry both an intelligent cellular telephone and everyone’s favorite variety of fisticuff-enchancing brass implements. Well worry no more, because the iPhone 4 and 4s Knucklecase has you covered. For the low price of $99 dollars, you can buy this aluminum — not brass — case and feel safe in your really-not-bad-enough-that-you-need-brass knuckles neighborhood. The downside? The design is hopelessly flawed. You’d be better off hitting evil-doers with a wet fish. Not even a big one. Like a guppy or something.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with how brass knuckles fit, but for the other two of you, here’s a brief overview. The brass itself fits snuggly around the part of your finger just past your second knuckle. You know, the part you’d punch people with. Also, you want the loops to fit snugly and the handle to be supported against your palm so that it doesn’t slide around when you land that hook and mangle your hand. The Knucklecase would be awful at accomplishing either of these things.

Sure, it’s cool in theory, but an iPhone, especially with the addition of a case, is way too wide, so basically you end up with one of two bad situations. If you fit your fingers in the knuckle loops where they belong, you’re going to have no palm support and you’d be just as well off prodding someone with a rubber fist.

And if you try to solve that problem, you aren’t even going to be able to hold the thing, because your actual knuckles – the second joint-y part of your fingers — are going to be sitting right in that loop (if they even fit in there like that) and the business part of your fist is going to be awkwardly pitched across the phone’s body.

On top of that, if you look closely at the promo shot, you’ll see that righties who might try to wear this thing will have their palm all over the screen, which just seems like a poor choice.

All that being said, the makers of Knucklecase assert that it isn’t to be used for face-punching. From their website under “Terms of Sale”:

Damage to yourself is way more likely than damage to third parties, I think. Still, even if you aren’t going to be punching any faces with it, you’ll be hard-pressed to make this case even fit on your hand and look cool because the size of the iPhone is quite awkward. And its value as a “handle” is only as useful as rubbing your palm all over the screen. As cool as the concept may seem, it’s probably not worth $99 and the extra space in your pocket even as a conversation piece. Besides, there are actually much better iPhone defense cases out there, if you reallywant to wave your valuables in the face of would-be muggers.

There are two roads to courage, and this is neither of them.

(h/t Technabob)