One thing these days you can’t have enough of wit nowadays smartphones, and that's fuel, juice aka battery life. Nowadays smartphones will not last a day with heavy use. I know for a fact that when people play Ingress for instance use a lot of juice, people are connected to Data and GPS all the time. (Dom and Johan I’m looking at you guys)
And these functions are battery hungry like crazy. mophie has found a solution for those who do not want to mess with their batteries. This thing is a case and charger in one, so when your device runs out, you simply flick a switch on the case and your phone starts to recharge.
We will run through this thing and see if it is worth buying it for $99.- worldwide or in the Benelux for €99,-.
We received 2 juice packs from mophie, 1 for the Galaxy S3 and 1 for the Galaxy S4.
We will be reviewing the one for the S4, cause this is “the” phone to get right now.
Design
The mophie comes in a compact box which contains the 2 main ingredients:
1) The mophie Juice pack itself
2) micro-USB charging cable.
The case itself is just an empty shell where you can slide your phone onto charging port.
On its back we have a hole for the Camera lens from the phone, and at the bottom there is a switch, four little LEDS and a button.
This button allows the user to determine how much juice is left in the case, when you press it the LEDS will light up.
The switch lets you switch to the juice pack when you run out of battery of your phone.
If we have a look at the size of this thing it is expected to be bigger that the normal cases around, as this pack houses an additional 2300 mAh battery. mophie promises you an extra battery life of 80% and we can tell you we managed to get an extra 7 hours of battery life with it.
Wrap up
If we take a look at the juice pack itself it feels very premium with its soft touch rubbery finish. We can say that this is one of the best if not the best juice packs around.
The cut outs and buttons for the camera,speakers,headphone, power and sound control are perfectly aligned.
When you phone is empty and sits in its case you can charge this the normal way, when it is fully charged the charge will be redirected to the case.
Our findings conclude that the case charges itself in about 2 hours flat, which is normal for this size battery.
We charged the Galaxy S4 with the mophie all the way from a depleted state and it resulted in a charge of 77% and the second time we managed to score a 76%, so you can say that mophie delivers what they promise.
The only downside is its price, here in the Benelux you can buy it at www.gearfactory.nl for a price of €99,- which is an acceptable price. (Worldwide this is $99,- and we advise you to look at mophie's own site)
The mophie is a very well-built product and if you do not want to mess with spare batteries and you have a little money to burn, the Mophie is the battery pack to buy!
Below some pictures of the Galaxy S3 juice pack.
BTW: Want to win one of these cases?? Just leave a comment below which one you want to win?
