product review: Mophie juice pack air iphone battery case

I’m a heavy iphone user, I always leave my wifi and bluetooth on, stream a lot of music through the sirius app, play video podcasts, web access and more. Typically I start the day with a full charge, and by 3pm I end up needing to charge it. I have a couple external batteries I use to get me by if I am on the road, but they are not the most convenient thing to hook to the phone on the run. 

So yesterday I picked up the Mophie Juice Pack Air for the iphone. It functions as a case, and as a external battery. It is rated at 1200mAh, and claims it basically doubles your iphone battery life.

Included in the box is the two piece case, and a usb cord to charge the battery. The case is simple to install, just slide your iphone into it, then put the top piece on and you are in business. At the bottom of the case is a small switch, you switch it on to provide power to the iphone. So basically you can run around, use the phone as you normally would, and when it gets to 20% life just flip the switch and you begin charging your battery. It works great. The time it takes to charge your phone is about the same as a normalusb charger. The case uses a small usb port to charge, it takes 2-3 hours to fully charge it. You can leave yourphone in the case and it will charge both the case and iphone battery at the same time.

The case gives you full access to all your controls, camera and ports (with the exception of the power/data port at the bottom of the phone) This is really the only negative point of the case, I tend to synch my phone with my macbook pro twice a day to update my podcast library, so I will be slipping it in and out of the case often.

The design is simple, smooth shiny black that protects the phone fairly well. I wish it extended a bit further to protect the chrome bezel of the phone, but it works well as it is. It is as slippery as the actual iphone, so you need to be careful there. (I’m used to my otterbox case with the grippy rubber sides)

The case makes your iphone much bigger, but still small enough to carry in a front pocket. The case does get hot when you are using it to charge the phone- I took a shot of it while charging with my FLIR camera- it showed a 103F surface temperature on a part of the case.

On the back of the case is four LED lights that show charging progress, or when you are carrying the phone it shows the case battery state. 

In actual use it did exactly what it says it would. It fully charged my iphone while I carried it with me. At this point I recommend it to any heavy user of the iphone. You will be able to get through a full day with a device that is not much bigger than the original phone. I paid less than $80.00 for the case and feel like it’s a good value for what it is. 

© 2009, Bill Gillam. All rights reserved.