Four days with the Mophie Juice Pack Air

Mophie Juice Pack Air

Something of an impulse buy, I’d been considering the Mophie for a week or two, but decided to make the leap after a rather tumultuous morning which involved last-minute packing, an unplugged iPhone and a narrowly-made flight. I hobbled through the next twelve or fourteen hours on 20-30% battery power and even less sleep. At that point, the thought of spending $80 for a device that would double my battery life and protect my phone was much more palatable.

For those who do not know what the Mophie Juice Pack Air is all about, it’s a pretty slick piece of plastic that sheaths your iPhone in hard-case protection and has a built-in battery, so it doubles as a battery extender. For anyone who’s been without a charged iPhone for any length of time, the advantages are obvious. And thus, with my phone reduced to emergency use only, I hobbled into an Apple store approximately 3,000 miles from my home to grab one. Here’s the highlights, after four days of use…

Good Things

• Performance: Awesome. This case effectively doubles your battery life and if you do it right, you can get a little more than that. There’s no disappointment here.
• Shape/Bulk: Not as bad as I feared. It does add thickness, which makes it a little heavier in the pocket, but it doesn’t ruin the lines of the phone…again, as badly as I feared. The worst part is the extra couple centimeters at the bottom–that affects usage the most when in landscape mode, and is pretty aggravating. (Dear Mophie: Find a way to reduce that so I can almost forget the case is even on there.) Don’t get me wrong–you will notice the change–but it has not changed my usage of the phone. You have to decide if you love the phone for the design or the functionality. I’m in the second category (not that it’s bad to be in the first, you just wouldn’t put this under “Good Things”).
• Design/Accessibility: No problems here. The case is made to fit the phone tightly and it does the job well. Getting the phone in and out is a simple matter. Access to the important bits (volume control, lock switch, etc) is only minimally impacted. Gets a little tricky to turn the ringer back on when the switch in pointed to vibrate, but it’s a small issue.
• Ease of use: Impressive. There’s clearly extensive thought that has gone into figuring out how this thing works…and it bears some explanation. Turns out, you are actually carrying around a portable charging station, as it is not automatic and the charge is controlled by a switch on the bottom. Flip it on, and the iPhone shows as charging. Flip it off, and the iPhone acts as normal. You have full use of the phone while it is charging, as though it were plugged in. Plugging the phone/case into the wall produces the expected result…both the phone and case charge unless, it seems, the case is completely dead. Then, the case itself takes precedence until reaching some predetermined charge level and the phone starts to charge. When untethered, turning the phone off and the case on will net you a little more charge, as it uses more juice when on and being charged at the same time. Really, you don’t have to think about it but to turn the case on when the iPhone’s battery starts getting low.
• Other Good Stuff: This is a well-manufactured piece–it doesn’t feel cheap. The charging port has no give and the two pieces of the case fit tightly together. The charge lights on the back are a nice touch, providing valuable feedback with a solid button-click.

Not-so-good Things

• Heat: I guess this is to be expected, but the case does produce a decent bit of heat when charging the phone, and this of course doubles when plugged in. If you’re holding the phone and charging from the case, you’ll have a bad case of sweaty palms, but nothing like if you fell asleep with a MacBook Pro on your lap.
• Reception: Minor changes to signal reception. I have also spent the last couple days in a signal-challenged area, which has not helped. That said, both wi-fi and cell reception are impacted, if minimally so. (But you’re on AT&T’s network, so you probably won’t even notice.)
• Speaker: Well, the case completely covers the speaker. This is not a problem for regular notifications (you won’t miss a call or text message), but attempting to blast music through the phone’s rear will be an even less satisfying experience than it already is.

Bad Things

• Charger: This is the one place where I feel like I got stiffed–the charger is a mini-USB 2.0 cable of some variation, instead of the standard iPhone/iPod cable, which necessitates a cable changeover. This may be some sort of engineering requirement, but it is still incredibly aggravating. The one good thing is that the cable Mophie provides plugs directly into the iPhone’s wall charger. Yes, you can still sync through it.
• Design: Ok, I’m going to come back to it: that bottom piece could use some improvement. It is not a deal-breaker, but it is is pretty close and really annoying.

Any questions about the case/charger? Feel free to leave a comment!