Sowing Circle's iPhone Blog

When Dan and I were in the Apple Store in Irvine (buying Dan’s protective case), the store clerk (I don’t know what fancy name Apple gives them) suggested a protective case that also included an additional battery.  Unfortunately, after she told us about them, she looked on the rack and they were sold out.  Today I happened to be in the Mission Viejo Apple Store and they had them in stock.  It looked so good, that I decided to buy one.  ( I had looked on the web and noticed that they were not any cheaper…a cool $79.95).   There’s a nice little picture below of the three colors available.  I got the basic business black.

The unit’s total thickness is .75 inches (~19 mm).  But, what is really nice though is that it is only 1/8 of an inch thicker than the very slim protective case that I  had.   For that 1/8 of an inch, I get just about 2x the battery life.  The 3GS is rated at 300 standby hours, the Morphie Juice Pack Air adds an additional 270 hours. In addition, it is totally encapsulates (other than the face on which I use one of the film protective screens anyway), the phone with a nice hard protective plastic.  Note: there is a model named Morpie Juice Pack (minus the “Air”) that is only partially encapsuating (more on that later).

But it includes a nice feature that I did not see on a couple of other battery expansion cases.

There is a switch on the bottom to designate whether you want the internal battery or the external battery to be operative.  Why would you want to have it use the internal battery first you ask?  That was my question too. But there is a good answer.

In the normal mode, the external battery provides a constant charge to the internal battery.  So if the internal battery is less than full, it will first charge the internal, and then use the external battery as its primary source.  So when the external battery is drained, you still have a full iPhone battery.  So that seems like the best solution, and I think most often it would be.  BUT, Morphie’s documentation notes that the iPhone actually uses a bit of power to charge itself.  So, you will get a little less battery life in the normal mode because a bit of the external battery power will be used in the constant chargin process.

So if you are absolutely going to be stretched for battery power, they suggest you go into “standby mode.”  In this mode, you use the internal battery first and no charge is sent to the iPhone battery until you flip the switch.  So you could run the iPhone battery down 50%, flip the switch to charge it (it shows the same charging info as if it were connected to computer or AC).  When filled up, flip it to “standby mode” again, and so on.

The other model named Morphie Juice Pack (minus the “Air”) is more expensive $99.95,  has a bigger battery, and is a bit thicker (.85 inches).  if all you want to do is use this as a portable charging unit, this might be better, since it just slides in and out easy since it does not have a top end to protect the unit.  But since I want a protective case anyway, I think the “Air” model is more to my taste.