Customer Reviews

mophie juice pack case and rechargeable battery for iPhone 3G, 3G S

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

The Mophie is the first stress reliever for Iphone. It removes the concern of a dead battery so you are free to use your phone without the fear of "will I make it through the day?"

We have owned over (7) 1G Mophie's in our office, so we have really put them to the test.

Below is my review of the 3G Mophie so far.

THE PROS:
1. They add additional protection and can take a drop from 4 feet pretty well.
2. The extra battery life rivals ANY product on the market
3. The non skid surface helps accidental iPhone dropping
4. You can recharge your friends dead iPhone (happens A LOT)
5. You are the only one with a charged phone when its 10pm
6. The added weight is minimal and well worth it.
7. Nice snug fit and sleek look
8. You can now sync your phone with a mini-usb cable!
(because the bottom is now mini-usb and not iphone cable, this is huge because how many times have you forgotten your cable, and now you can use the same one from a portable hard drive, camera, etc!)


THE CONS:
1. The non slip rubber does come off and the Mophie starts looking kinda sad (thats on the 1G, will update if the 3G stays the same) (UPDATE: RUBBER FELL OFF ALL 3 OF THE NEW ONES TOO, COME ON MOPHIE GUYS, THATS RIDICULOUS, GET BETTER GLUE ALREADY)
2. The same benefit in #8 above is a curse if you only have your iphone cable. Now you would have to carry the mini-usb too..
3. Everyone will want to use your Mophie to charge their phone. (no joke, this becomes almost annoying)
4. The side rubber came off on one out of 7 of our mophies (1G), but we never contacted the company, so im sure they would have done something about that. CONTACTING MOPHIE ABOUT RUBBER, WILL UPDATE...
5. Say goodbye to cases, your case will have to come off to put it in the mophie.
6. Its HARD to get the iphone out now vs the 1G. The 3G mophie you have to pretty much pinch and pull, where as before you could just slide it up from the bottom leveraging the space that DID exist. This will most likely be fixed in short order. (you can always just squish the volume button to pull it out, but I try not to man handle any buttons on the iPhone itself too frequently)


SUMMARY:
Even with its Cons, the Mophie STILL gets a 5 star rating (NOW DOWN TO 3 STAR BECAUSE OF SIDE RUBBER ISSUES). Once you get used to having it, its impossible to live without! Bare with its faults to have the best battery life you can image, or wait for something better, but I wouldn't hold your breath. (to prove just how far you will go, I actually shoved my 3G into my 1G mophie case till it finally died under the stress and thankfully, within days the 3G mophie came out)



SMALL NOTES TO THE PEOPLE AT MOPHIE:
1. The battery indicator on the back is now slightly "out" from the rest of the body, Mophie should fix this. While right now its not a problem, i can see this leading to wear on that button.
2. Offer other background colors than just the green.
3. FIX THE RUBBER ALREADY.. THIS IS NOW A HUGE DEAL

the battery life is awesome.. but the rubber sides come off and the glue gets all over your phone and the back of the mophie.

the glue melts because the case gets warm when you really use the phone..

not good.

Everything is great, the instant charging, the stylish inner green case to the cool 4 blue power LED indicator lights on the back of the juice pack, but with the exception of one thing that really annoyed me personally but some of you may find it acceptable was the fact that if your iPhone 3G sits inside the mophie juice pack it actually drains power from the juice pack itself whether or not you are using your iphone. To make it a little more clear....for example if your 3g iPhone is fully charged before you inserted into your mophie juice pack it will continuously drain power from the juice pack and by the end of the day your 4 blue reserve power indicator lights will go down to zero indicating that your juice pack is now completely drained.

That bothered me a lot because if my iphone is just standing by that means by the end of the day my juice pack is completely drained and it added zero value for me as a reserved back up. I even tried physically turning off the iPhone (hold top on/off and home button for 3 seconds) over night to prevent the power drainage but that still does not work. My point is if I don't have a juice pack and I let my iPhone stand by the next day I would still have full power in my iPhone so really having a juice pack is not adding any additional value for me as a reserve power pack if I am not continuously using my iPhone.

I called Mophie about this annoyance and they told me it is a firmware issue with the iPhone that whenever the iPhone sees an external power connection it will continuously drain the power from its source similarly to when you are plugging in your iphone AC adapter to the wall outlet. Mophie is telling me that they are working with Apple on this but I would have think if Mophie provided an on/off button on the juice pack it would have solved this issue. Mophie's work around solution was that they told me to carry the juice pack separately and only physically slide it in when my I really need the extra power. But why in the world would I now want to carry two items in my pocket separately...the whole idea and beauty of the mophie is to allow me to carry an extra battery pack which beautifully integrates with my iPhone NOT to have to carry two separate items like some of the other product out on the market (richard solo,ect...)

The part that really worked well with mophie is indeed if you are continuously using your iPhone it will actually double your current usage capacity. But the moment you stop using your iPhone is the moment that the juice pack stops adding value for you because it will continue to drain power from it.

If you were an industrial designer let's say it was your task to create a molded battery/case enclosure for the iphone. It would have to offer extended battery life, durability, be attractive or at least not ugly, and have a good warranty and service should something go wrong.
So...let's rate the Mophie Juice Pack for iphone 3g.

1. Extended battery life. Well...yes..it does do this..but the first one I had went bad
2. Durability. Within 2 weeks of use major signs of wear appear. The rubberized coating begins
to come off and it looks like a device that has been used for years. This is simply unacceptable.
WHY would they ADD on GLUED rubber strips instead of a single molded piece? And then use GLUE that
melts within a week or so? These rubber "side grips" are also hard to glue back on since once removed they
are too long for the slot they were intended for.
3. Be attractive. The green case internally I suppose is debatable..I like it but frankly it's an odd choice
without any intelligent reasoning behind it that is discernible. Why bright lime green? Style for something that is always hidden? In any event...the outside begins looking like 10 miles of bad road in the first 30 days so the point I suppose is moot.

4. The first time I called Mophie about this they said..No problem..we will send you out a new one with a return authorization number.. I waited 2 weeks. No shipment. Called again...got it 10 days later. The replacement fell apart even sooner. I work in an office not a construction site.

If anyone at Mophie reads these things I think you should do a product recall and replace it with a more realistically designed version...with a tougher coating and no glued on rubber grips.
Anything less than this borders on criminality. Why would ANYONE pay $99 for something this poorly designed and built?

I love my Mophie.

I'm a very heavy iphone user: Lots of calls, reading books, playing chess, surfing the web etc, etc. I love the mophie and feel that the additional weight and size is no negative at all.

I did have the problem with the gooey glue (as others have mentioned). They replaced the unit, and I got the problem again. Now, I've removed the pads and glue, cleaned it up, and it's fairly perfect. The remaining indentations look fine (people would guess that they are intended as is) and they also provide some slip resistance. No Problem.

ALTERNATIVES:
Mili by PhoneSuit
I've had problems with two MiLi's in that their LED's have failed to work most of the time i've had them. They do seem to offer a little more juice than the mophie.

FastMac iv for iphone 3g
This product offers far more battery life than any alternative I've had. Problem for me is that the extra size and weight is really noticeable in my hand and pocket. Note however, that when I had a recent multi-day power outage in my area, and my network was down, I was thrilled to have a fully charged FastMac iv to get me through. If you're a non-stop talker, or do a lot of camping, this might be the one for you.

Mophie Juice Pack Air
The other product to consider is Mophie's Juice-Pack-Air, which is thinner, offers full case protection, looks very slick, but has (as a trade off) slightly less battery life. It's reduced battery capacity may actually be compensated for by the fact that you can power it off until the iphone is way down, and then turn it on for a full quick charge. The circuitry itself uses juice whenever the power is on (as is always the case with the mophie 3G, even when the iphone is fully charged). But with this on-off approach, the juice-pack-air is on only when it's really needed, and thus, for a very short time. I suspect you may get more usable juice this way, with the juice-pack-air, than you can with an always-on Mophie 3G. Note that it can, if desired, be left on all the time, like the mophie 3G.

I loved my mophie for about a month, until the side panels started sliding around and getting glue all over everything.

Now, into my 4th month of ownership, the charges have become erratic. At first, for 2 weeks it wouldn't hold charges at all, so I thought it had finally exceeded it's allotted charges and was going to dump it. Then, this week I decided to give it another shot because I couldn't find my charger for my iphone, so plugged it in to capture a charge. Oddly enough, it started working just fine again, and has for the entire week. Holding charges just fine. However, when I try to sync now, I lose my connection. Also, when not syncing, lately I notice that the mophie will just stop powering the phone all together, even though it has a full charge in it. I have to pull out my phone and reseat it, then all is well for a good day or so.

What a pain. Save your money.

The side strips are glued on. The heat from the phone and your hands melts the adhesive and causes the strips to slip off, exposing your skin to extremely sticky glue. Moreover, the side strips cannot be repositioned for long before they slip off again.

I have been forced to tape the bottom half of the Juice Pack with transparent packing tape to hold the side strips in place. Using the phone, I look like the nerd/crazy person who Scotch tapes his eye glasses.

Moreover, the unit comes to look worn very, very quickly because the attractive but hardly durable matte finish soon scrapes off, exposing patches of shiny black subsurface.

I complained to Mophie about the side strips preventing me from holding the Juice Pack and they replaced the unit, but the same problem happened again within the same two-week time frame.

Think about it: This device has just TWO functions -- to charge your battery and serve as a case for the iPhone. But if you do as you're supposed to do with a handheld device and, well, HOLD it, it punishes you for doing so.

And if you can't hold it, you can't use it, so who cares who well it charges your battery?

The charging ability is good. However, the device is falling apart. The side grips came off, and I had to glue them back on.

I bought this in January 2009.
Everything was great, except for the glue problem you've read about.

But since my IPhone 3G was updated to OS 3.0, the battery pack does not charge the phone.

Correction Aug 02, 2009:
This was a coincident.
It turns out that I had a defective Juice Pack!
Morphie and company honored their 1 yr warranty and paid for shipping!

I am now upgrading it from a two to a 4 (1 off for the glue problem)

I now have a brand new fully working Juice Pack!

Just in case you didn't understand...it was NOT a problem with OS 3.0.

Within the first week the side rubber covers of the juice pack came un-glued. Also, the rubber type coating started fading and exposing the hard black plastic body. The functionality of the Juice Pack is solid, but the esthetics and feel is a great disappointment. I do not want to deal having to wipe my hands of glue and making sure I don't lose the glued rubber side covers. BUYER BEWARE!