Mophie announces Juice Pack Pro, looks epic
Mophie is a big name in the iPhone world. Its products has been the standard for external battery cases for the iPhone for years, and while that market is more crowded now than it used to be, its products are still very popular.
Now that the company has announced a new version of the Juice Pack battery case, it’s the most interesting such case I’ve seen in ages. Without the ability to use a bigger external battery, iPhones have been restricted to these add-on battery cases since the very first model for anyone who wants an all-in-one unit with better battery life. Unfortunately these cases tend to follow the same recipe of adding a plastic lump to the back of the phone which means that shock protection is as non-existent as compatibility with other cases. The new Juice Pack Pro on the other hand doesn’t look anything like that. It looks like a heavy duty protective case, the kind that Otterbox is famous for. Quite frankly, it looks awesome.
It’s not just about looks of course. The case is built to MIL-STD 810G military specifications, which means that your phone is protected from a certain amount of impact, dust, and water splash (it’s not water proof though). There are pass through controls for everything so nothing is exposed, and even the screen is hidden behind a built-in screen protector. A microUSB port handles charging and syncing.
While the case generally looks like a normal heavy duty case, it is a Mophie product after all. That means that the thickness you see in the pictures isn’t just padding, it’s also a battery. 2500mAh worth of battery to be exact. If you use the standby mode correctly and charge from the battery when the phone actually needs it, you should get somewhere between 2-3 times normal battery life with the iPhone battery and the case battery combined.
My first reaction to this case was “geocaching.” I’ve used an iPhone for geocaching before, and the battery drains very fast when you use 3G data, the screen, and the GPS all at once. Compared to my Oregon 450 outdoor GPS, the physical differences are also very obvious, and I wouldn’t wave a smartphone around the forest like I do my GPS. With this case though, I would.
While I no longer use an iPhone, and there are extended batteries that reach well over 3000mAh for the phone I have now, I still sort of wish there were a case like this for it. It’s just one of those cases that looks like it would break the asphalt rather than the phone if you dropped it, and when you pair that with a 2500mAh battery and military specifications, the $130 price tag doesn’t seem so far fetched.
[Mophie via Engadget]
