Mophie Juice Pack
By So here I am on vacation. The sun is warm, the waves are a bit rough and the wifi is horrid. Seriously, the wifi here brings me back to the good old days of dial-up and they weren’t such good old days.
As a result of the anemic wifi I have found myself using my iPod touch far more than the HP MiniNote 1000 I picked up prior to my trip. (it is, by the way, an awesome netbook!). The touch seems to work far better for me for checking email, keeping up with my rss feeds and even writing. It isn’t that the wifi is better on it but that the optimized interfaces on the Touch just feel faster and work much better for me.
Add to all this the fact that I am having a good time playing some games while away and the result is a Touch whose battery runs down super fast.
Enter the Mophie JuicePack for iPhone 3G.
The battery arrive the day before we left and I am glad it did. Like the RichardSolo 1800 we reviewed last week, the Mophie bring 1800mAhr of love to the Touch and iPhone. It is made of a stong material that also feels soft to the touch. A four light battery meter on the back tells you how much battery is left at the touch of a button and a miniUSB port on the bottom makes charging a breeze.
Where the Mophie stands out is in it’s physical design. Rather than attaching to the bottom of the device the way most external batteries seem to, the Mophie "hugs" the device like an openfaced case. No, it doesn’t protect it, but it does allow the device to be fully used. This even included the camera.
The result is the fact that I am typing this on my Touch while the Touch is powered and charged by it. While the battery adds significant weight, it does not interfere with the actual use of the Touch or iPhone. In fact, I tried playing some of my favorite racing games with both the iPhone and Touch in it and had no difficulty at all.
In all, this is a quality battery that was designed incredibly well.
What I Like: great design, no loss of device usage while charging, and adds tons of addition life thanks to huge battery capacity.
What needs improvement:
At a retail price of $99, it is substantially more than the RichardSolo battery.
Blocks headphone jack when used with Touch.
