Moderns smartphones are great but one area in which
they are far from perfect is battery life. While things have gotten better over
time and larger batteries are finding their way in modern devices, Apple has
never been a champion in that regard. While the efficiency of its devices
provides decent battery life, some power users still find themselves out of
juice by the end of the day.
This is where cases with integrated batteries come
in. Recently, leaks showed that Apple might release one soon, but while we’re
waiting for an official announcement, another company has just announced its
version of the desired product.
The news comes from CES 2019 via AppleInsider and
the product comes from Mophie and is called Juice pack access. One cool feature
about this battery case is that it doesn’t plug into the iPhone’s Lightning
port, so you can freely use it for your wired headphones or data transfer.
Instead, the case charges the phone using wireless charging while the case itself
can also be charged wirelessly (or via USB Type-C). When put on a wireless
charger, the case will transfer the power to the iPhone first, before filling
its own juice, meaning there’s hardly any reason to remove it.
Besides that, the Juice pack access boasts
high-impact protection, so it should keep your iPhone not only well fed but
safe as well! The integrated battery's capacity is 2,000mAh (for the iPhone XS),
which Mophie says will boost the talk time to 31 hours in total. The iPhone XS
is rated at up to 20 hours of talk time, so you can expect about a 50% boost in
battery life. Of course, all that comes with an added bulk to your phone, but
as far as battery cases go, this one is relatively compact and weighs only 3.25
oz.
There will be cases for the iPhone XS, XS Max (with
2,200 mAh battery) and XR, coming in different colors sometime in the first
quarter of 2019 at US$ 120. Will Apple reveal its own battery cases before the end
of March? We don’t know, but we bet Mophie hopes the answer is “no”.
