By Andrew Liszewski

It’s still a while away before you can officially install it on your iPhone, but the iOS 5 update will finally bring the much anticipated ability to take a photo with your iPhone using the volume button. Making a lot of third party-accessories that promise to add this ability somewhat obsolete. Unless they avoid those one-trick-pony trappings like the Kapok case from Canopy manages to do. Besides added protection and even very useful tripod mounts, the case interfaces with your iPhone’s dock connector providing additional functionality when taking photos.

A set of two dedicated shutter buttons let you do half-presses for setting focus and auto-exposure like with a P&S camera, and when used with the accompanying free Canopy Camera Tools app you can even use the second shutter button to capture stills while recording videos. Or, if you’re a developer type, there’s even an open source SDK for the case letting you write your own app and take advantage of those dual buttons however you’d like. At $69.95, available for pre-order now, the Kapok case is a bit on the expensive side, but it does include a free mini ball head that can even be used as a makeshift tripod with the packaging.

[ Kapok iPhone Case ] VIA [ The Gadgeteer ]