While every other battery cradle I’ve used has placed the indicator lights on the back, MiLi has made the long overdue move of putting them on the front. Humorously, I’ve grown so used to having to flip my iPhone upside down to see how much juice my cradle has left over the years that while testing the Power Pack I kept instinctively flipping it over only to remember that the lights are on the front where they should be. And while the black rubber of the Juice Pack has eventually blistered on every unit I’ve gone through, the Power Pack uses shiny acrylic plastic that matches the exterior of the iPhone 3GS. And although the choice of interior colors doesn’t much matter because the interior disappears as soon as you insert your iPhone, you do get a choice of black or white here. The Power Pack is also two-thirds the price and provided about the same battery life in my tests (the specs say that the Power Pack actually has about ten percent more power than the Juice Pack). And the Power Pack has an USB port for simultaneously charging another device.

To be fair, Mophie’s efforts seem to have instead gone into the Juice Pack Air battery case, which offers the same acrylic backing and choice of colors. And Fastmac’s bulky iV cradle offers more battery life than any of the above. But as far as ergonomic one-piece battery cradles go, MiLi’s Power Pack has pulled into the lead. Just one complaint: please lose the silly mini-USB port and replace it with a real iPhone docking port so we don’t have to travel with multiple charging cables.

While on most days I’m content to use a battery case or cradle and the resulting doubling or tripling of my iPhone’s battery life, on my recent cross country road trip I found that keeping my iPhone charged at my bedside overnight, or even keeping it charged at a hotel desk all day without tying up my laptop’s USB ports, was a frequent challenge. So I often fell back on an external battery brick, which was handy, but even it had to be recharged via USB, which meant plugging it into my laptop at some point (or traveling with a third party wall charging brick). But the ZAGGsparq, with its built in wall charging capability would have changed that equation: charge it by day via a wall plug, then leave my iPhone plugged into it on the nightstand at night. Everyone has their own iPhone and iPod usage patterns, so I’m sure some you can think of ways in which you’d put it to use.

But while the concept is nice, it’s the brute-force amount of battery life that makes the ZAGGsparq worth toting around despite its large size: while the company claims it’ll quadruple your iPhone’s battery life, my two full cycles with the product suggest that ZAGG’s estimate is conservative, as it basically quintupled things for me. Now that’s some real power. I do wish there were a way to recharge the ZAGGsparq via a computer for those times when doing so is desirable, but beyond that there’s little to quibble with here: if you want a long-lasting battery brick that easily recharges from a wall socket and can recharge two devices at once, here’s your winner. I can’t wait to use this one on my next cross-country flight. Please lose the big yellow logo, though. And our rating would have been higher if the price weren’t so exceedingly high.

As you might expect, the price point brings some compromises with it. While the $129 ZAGGsparq offers a mind-blowing 6000 mAh of battery life, and form-fitting battery cradles typically offer 1800 to 3300 mAh, the Charge & Sync+ offers a mere 1400, putting it barely above the svelte Juice Pack Air battery case. What 1400 mAh means is that the Charge & Sync+ will not-quite-double your iPhone’s battery life, or if your iPhone’s battery is dead to begin with, not quite charge it up to full. For this price, I’ll take it.

Further attempting to push the value quotient, the Charge & Sync+ not only comes with an iPhone/iPod connector cable (several more expensive batteries inexplicably don’t), the cable is actually built in to the brick. Unfortunately this is an instance of a product outsmarting itself, as extending the cable requires undoing the kind of plastic trap door that you’d have to pop open to change the AA batteries in an alarm clock; not something you want to be fiddling with every time you go to use the product. And in a head scratching move, the built in electrical prongs can’t be extended until the cable has been unwrapped – meaning you have to go through all the trap door hoopla just to charge up the brick itself, let alone connect it to your device. It’s nice that they’ve included separate tips for charging mini and micro USB devices, but the cable implementation is so befuzzled that I’d rather have seen then go with a simple USB port and a separate cable. As such it’s a three star product that gets bumped up half a star for being a good value play despite the flawed concept.

Now here comes the followup in the form of the Gum Plus, which is largely the same product in terms of specs, but the black plastic styling has been completely replaced with an aluminum body wrapped with a black stripe which not-so-subtly resembles my MacBook Pro laptop. As a user of Apple products this makes me happy. And with so many PC laptops now borrowing similar styling, it’ll probably fit in well on that side of the fence as well. Of course the catch is that the Gum Plus is a battery for your iPhone or iPod, not your laptop, and while it does match the various silver-colored iPod models, it doesn’t match the iPhone or iPod touch stylistically at all.

Of course looks are secondary to what you might actually use it for, and this is more of a product for keeping your iPhone or iPod charged overnight next to your bed, and a power outlet isn’t handy; trying to actually walk around throughout your day with a brick like this plugged into your iPhone isn’t going to fly. But the Gum Pro / Gum Plus does represent the best value I’ve seen yet, by far, when it comes to this kind of battery, and quadrupling your iPhone’s battery life is nothing to sneeze at.

review by Bill Palmer

The good news is that there are now enough bottom snap-on batteries on the market for iPhone and iPod that you have your choice of vendors. The bad news is that some of these options just don’t measure up when it comes to capacity vs price. That such an example comes from a vendor like Macally is a surprise, as the company’s products, while rarely splashy, are typically priced aggressively enough to rank pretty high on the value scale.



But not so much with its new PowerLink8, whose most distinctive quality is that its back and sides are shiny acrylic white, which may appeal to users of white iPhones. But aside from that, the PowerLink8 sports a surprisingly high $39 price tag, which puts it in direct competition with an identically priced competing battery from Kensington, yet the PowerLink8 doesn’t last as long (750mAh capacity vs. 100mAh capacity). Even the Kensington product will only give your iPhone about a 50% boost, and the PowerLink8 offers even less, barely boosting your battery life by a third. And if you can stomach buying a no-name generic competitor, such batteries with 1000mAh or more can be found around the web for $15.



My recommendation when it comes to boosting your iPhone’s battery life hasn’t changed: if you can afford to, skip the snap-ons and get yourself an $80 form-fitting battery case or a $100 battery cradle, as such products can be used at all times while these bottom snap-on batteries are too awkward and unstable to keep plugged into your iPhone while in your pocket. Then again, having an inexpensive snap-on battery around can’t hurt, especially if you’ve got more than one iPhone/iPod model in the house and want to be able to mix and match. But it’s tough to recommend a snap-on battery that competes both with identically priced higher-capacity name brand products and with significantly cheaper no-name options that also have higher capacities. So this one’s probably only for users of white iPhones.

Learn more about the PowerLink8 at Macally.com.

review by Bill Palmer

Ever since the iPhone launched two-plus years ago, power users have been gunning for additional battery life from wherever they can get it. That’s come primarily in the form of three types of products: form-fitting batteries that enshroud the iPhone in a cradle or case; slim rectangular batteries that snap onto the iPhone’s bottom, and standalone batteries that connect to the iPhone via a cable. The latter two have generally been considered a poor man’s version of the former, since they’re cheaper (in the $50 range, as opposed to $80-$100 for a cradle or case), and can’t be used in a manner all that practical when the iPhone is either in the user’s hand or pocket.



But if a standalone battery is going to break that rule, the Gum Pro from Just Mobile shows precisely how: with a metric ton of additional battery life that you can’t get from any form-fitting iPhone battery of any size. Battery life on the iPhone can be complicated to quantify in terms of hours due to its various functionalities (and combinations of those functions), but the Gum Pro with its 4400mAh can more or less quadruple the battery life you get from your iPhone’s internal battery; these claims were verified by the fact that I could recharge my nearly-drained iPhone via the Gum Pro three times in a row without charging the Gum Pro (which itself charges via USB).



It connects via USB to your iPhone and more or less sits beside it (you could toss the two of them connected together into a backpack, but not realistically shove them into your pocket while connected), meaning that it’s less for charging your iPhone while you’re using it and more about charging it up while your iPhone is sitting somewhere idly.



Examples? Charging your iPhone each night of a hiking trip. Getting you through a power outage. Lunch break at a conference. And so on. The Gum Pro isn’t exactly tiny, being about twice as thick as the iPhone, nearly as wide, two-thirds as tall, and a little heavier than the iPhone itself. But it’s a compact enough shape that it doesn’t feel overly bulky for what it offers. The lack of a wall charging brick or even an iPhone sync cable (you can use your own) feels like a cheap omission, but that’s my only complaint. The first non-form-fitting battery to receive more than four stars from us.

Learn more about the Gum Pro at Just-Mobile.com

review by Bill Palmer

The old sports adage is that if you’re not the most talented player on the field then you need to make up for it in other ways, by working harder, studying more film, and so on. The same could be said for Dexim’s BluePack S3 external battery. It’s not a form-fitting battery case or cradle that can charge your iPhone while it’s in your hand or your pocket. And as far as standalone batteries go that sit next to your iPhone or iPod and connect via USB, the Bluepack S3 can do a little more than double the life of a fully charged iPhone, which is barely half what you can do with the similarly priced competing Gum Pro. So just how does the S3 manage to earn four stars out of five? Like the slow running back or the weak-armed quarterback, the S3 makes up the difference with a slew of intangibles that come in handy in a variety of ways.


Actually, those “intangibles” are easily identifiable. Its shape is nearly the same as the iPhone itself, just a little shorter and a tad narrower – meaning that, like the iPhone, the S3 will slide easily into your pocket. Not that you can put it to good use in your pocket, but you’ll have it with you once you get there. Provided, of course, that you take the included iPhone/iPod connector cable with you, which is easy enough to do since it’s only about four inches long. And the word “included” is important as well, as the S3 actually comes with an iPhone cable, as opposed to the Gum Pro. But the S3 doesn’t stop there, far from it in fact. Also included are mini-USB and micro-USB cables for using the S3 to charge other kinds of devices (digital cameras, BlackBerry, etc). It even comes with a carrying sack along with a wall charging brick that sports two additional USB ports so you can use the combination of cables to charge up multiple devices at once. The USB charging cable (for recharging the S3 via your computer) is even a dual-USB cable, meaning that you can connect it to two USB ports on your computer at once so it’ll recharge faster (although it recharges just fine if you’ve only got one USB port available).



The battery unit also has a small flashlight built-in just in case (and come to think of it, where are the Ginsu knives?). The BluePack S3 is basically a three-star battery that gets bumped all the way up to four stars by including a slew of useful add-ons.

Learn more about the BluePack S3 at Dexim.net