mophie Juice Pack Air for iPhone

I ended up buying a mophie for a reason that didn't really have much to do with battery life directly. Embarrassingly, I ordered a TomTom Car Kit and after 3 months (yes, 3 months!!) of waiting, discovered that my car cigarette lighter has never worked...and that fixing would cost a great deal of money. So I re-thought my needs and realised that what I really wanted was a simple car stand (coming in another review) and something that saw me overcome my frustration with the battery life of an iPhone.

A good example of this was a recent trip to Sydney. By the time I flew from Palmerston North to Auckland, sat at PN and Auckland airports for around 3 hours and flew into Sydney (leaving my phone off whilst on the planes) I was almost rushing to the hotel room to get some power into my iPhone. Using the iPhone....and I really mean *using* the iPhone, drains the power immensely.

Another example...I have to go to Wellington for the day shortly and attend a conference. Even if I don't use the TomTom app, I know that by the end of the trip and a day at the conference, I'll be looking to charge my phone. So imagine that you could bring that charge with you?

I'm really impressed with the mophie. It is amazingly slender for what it is and the iPhone sits in it perfectly. You'll see in one of the images that there is no bottom opening for the speaker and microphone in the case. Instead, these are given room in the front of the design with small curved openings where the speakers and microphone are...but I didn't have issue with that. I found the case superb and could easily choose to leave the iPhone in the mophie case indefinitely. Although it adds a bit of weight, it certainly isn't enough to be noticeable and the look was very smart indeed.

The battery charge is straight forward, and having the LED indicators on the back is a god-send. Basically you can use the mophie in two ways. The first is to treat the iPhone and mophie as one big battery. In other words, have them joined and working together...as power comes out of the phone, it takes it from both batteries until it is drained. I used this approach when using the TomTom app for a 3 hour trip, as I knew I didn't want to have to manually switch the mophie over when the iPhone was almost drained. The only odd thing about this approach is that if you lock your phone because you are not using it, you suddenly get the battery charging sound. Why? Because the mophie uses the time to move its charge into the phone. If the Juice drains completely, it has been known to cause a screech. Check out http://vlatte.net/2010/03/review-mophie-juice-pack-air-for-the-iphone/ for an example of the noise.

The second approach is to not have the batteries working together. Even though the iPhone is in the mophie case, you can tell the mophie to leave the iPhone battery alone....and then just flick a switch when you deem it suitable, to make use of the stored power in the mophie. This is a good idea if you just want to use the mophie as backup and don't want to be drawing on its power constantly.

For a real world test, I used my iPhone in its mophie case for a 3 hour car trip, running the TomTom navigation app. Previously, as an iPhone alone, I have managed to get around 1 hr 45min of use before the TomTom app gave up and the iPhone was drained. Near the end of the 3 hours in this test, I got one warning of a low battery. But stopping at that point, I was still able to show friends some photos and video clips on the phone before it finally gave up and needed charging.

mophie claim that it doubles your charge. I would say in this first instance that I think it probably doesn't....but that it is exceedingly close.

I'm really pleased that the TomTom car kit didn't work out, because the approach I am now taking means that even out of my car, I can have an iPhone that lasts the distance for a lot longer.