Most (if not all) of the cases we’ve reviewed here at the Cult during the past three weeks of iPhone Case Week just lay around lazily like some muscle-bound Miami Beach sunbather, looking good and maybe keeping the pretty iPhone from getting beat up. But the Mophie Juice Pack Air is different; It doesn’t just sit around, man. It’s charging up and down the beach — and it wants to take the iPhone with it.
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Oh, don’t get me wrong — it’s still one hot-looking case. The satiny finish, bold (at least, on our ruby-red tester) color and kinda Guigaro-ish lines add a definite zing to an otherwise unadorned iPhone. But it’s also an action hero: Flip a switch on the bottom and the Juice Pack Air will start to charge the iPhone it’s wrapped around.
The Air also feels and operates like a well-oiled machine, with the seams, buttons and switches all appearing to have fairly tight tolerances. The case’s heft and finish feel good when held; the mute switch is difficult to access though. Thankfully, the Air didn’t exhibit any of the problems the Cult’s Pete Mortensen wondered about in a post last year.
Unfortunately, the Juice Pack Air doesn’t have much stamina. Using our standard backpack-battery testing procedure — charging from 2 percent till full with the iPhone and all radios turned off — I was only able to pump my 3GS up to about 60 percent full. By comparison, the TruePower iV Pro tested awhile back provided 250 percent more power, for about 20 percent more cost.
Another downside to the Air — this one pretty annoying — is that the case is pretty picky about which Micro-USB cable it’s prodded with. For instance, I couldn’t seem to get another Micro-USB cable I had lying around to fit in the rectangular bay; only the Mophie cable that came with the Air seemed to fit. Other Micro-USB cables may or may not fit, which could lead to some frustrated hunting for cables (or having to order a new one from Mophie) should you lose the one supplied.
Finally, the Air has the ability to sync the iPhone via its Micro-USB port, which means not having to take the case off for much (although I wasn’t quite convinced that the microphone and speaker performance were unaffected by the case’s enclosure, which means possibly taking the case off to speak anyway).
