Review of the Mophie Juice Pack Plus

The Mophie Juice Pack Plus is a case and an external battery for your phone. They have been around for a while now supporting the iPhone line of cell phones. This review is for the Mophie Juice Pack Plus for iPhone 5 and iPhone 5S. It intends to provide your iPhone 120% more battery with its 2100 mAh battery. It is also a case for your IPhone protecting from dents and dings, drops and falls. When purchased you get your Mophie case, main and lower pieces, a micro USB cable, and a headphone extender. You have three color choices to choose from Black, White or Red.

Front part of the Mophie Juice Plus packaging:

Rear part of the Mophie Juice Plus packaging

Slide out the enclosed box:

Unboxing the Morphie Juice Pack Plus

Next is what comes in the pack:

So above you have the top and lower portion of the case/battery. You have the USB cable for charging and you also have the headphone adapter.

Individual shots of each piece:

Top of case

Bottom of Case including 4 lights to show battery level when button is pressed

Headphone adapter

So I have had this battery case for a couple weeks and have been pretty happy with its aesthetics and performance. I had experience with an iPhone 3gs and also different big screen Android phones. So when I pulled the iPhone 5s out of the box it was so light, too light for me in reality.

Adding the Mophie Juice Pack Plus added some weight and girth that the 5s was missing for me. The phone feels more secure in my hand with the case on it. The case provides covers for the volume rocker and the power button and there isn’t much lost in the tactile feel. The case feels like a hard rubber which gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling.. I am pretty crazy when it comes to my devices but I think this will protect it well if I do drop it. Being that the case covers the bottom you may be concerned about the speaker phone function. Mophie actually created a couple of speaker ports which improve the output. I don’t need to turn the volume up quite as much as I did without the case which is a nice little benefit.

The performance of the battery was about what I expected. I was hoping work would take me on a trip to really test it out but that hasn’t worked out. So I charged both the phone and the Juice pack up. Per Mophie they want you to wait until your phone is in the red to charge it. So I left the phone uncharged, not plugged into a PC and let the battery drain down to the red, until the phone prompted to be charged. Click the little switch on the back of the case to “on” and you hear the iPhone bong indicating it is charging. Verified on the phone showing it is charging. A fully charged Mophie will get your phone to 80% battery charged, that is the easy lifting of charging. That last %20 is the heavy lifting that takes longer, needs more power and a plug in to get to 100%. The battery charges the phone to that 80% pretty quickly, under 40-50 minutes in the few times I have used it. In the end in the light to medium use between the iPhone and the Mophie Juice Pack Plus I got just over 4 days. I think, even with heavy use, I could get 2-3 days easy.

So how do charge the Juice Pack Plus?

It has the standard micro USB cable; one comes with the purchase, and a PC or common wall socket with USB port. I have used the Apple wall socket and the provided micro USB cable and it all charged fine. For me I have more micro USB cables than the new Lightning cables so this provides me some flexibility I would not have without the Mophie Juice Pack Plus.  On the back there is the battery level in the  4 leds which light u when the button is pressed.

Finally the headphone jack is accessible but most case you will need to add the provided headphone jack extender. It is a little stiffer than your normal headphone cable but other than that it insures all the functionality you would expect. That includes the use of you IPhone headphones and the functionality they bring, volume, music actions and Siri.

All in all the few weeks I have had the Mophie Juice Pack Plus I am very happy with it. It provides me a lot of flexibility. Extended battery life, protection, and for me the added weight that feels more comfortable.