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Mophie Juice Pack Air – quickie review

Summary: if you log lots of on-the-go iphone use, this is just the thing.

Mophie’s Juice Pack Air is a 1200 mAh battery pack / hardshell case for your iPhone. Charged up, it adds a significant amount of usage between charges.

I bought mine earlier this week, in consideration of a cross-country flight I had to make. The iPhone is a traveler’s dream device in all ways EXCEPT battery life. Those airport recharging stations are only useful if you can find an open outlet on one, something that’s been getting increasingly difficult every time I fly.

The mophie, both on my flight and during the subsequent conference I’ve been attending (think 5 hours a day stuck in incredibly boring keynotes and presentations), has been a game changer for me. Take today for example. I was up early, around 6 (thanks jetlag). I unplugged my iPhone, turned the mophie on, and started kicking my email inbox’s ass, all on 3G (The hotel charges $10/day for wifi, you know the drill). Then, I started bouncing between wordpress, tumblr, mobile photos, safari, and tweetie, all in 3G, including several picture uploads. I kept that up for a long time, well over an hour.

After breakfast, I found myself trapped in a stupid and irrelevant conference session, which brought on another storm of texting and email. By lunch break, after a morning of intensely high 3G usage (for me), the juice pack had finally depleted. I took it off my phone, and for the rest of the day my usage returned to a moderately high level (some google maps/gps usage; more email, a few pictures snapped and sent out).

As I sit here typing at 5:30, after more than 10 hours of heavy 3G use, my battery is only down to about 50%. I stuck the mophie on its charger after lunch and left it at the hotel room, so now I can pop it back on and easily make it through dinner and a bit of bar-hopping this evening.

In short, I’m very pleased.

Ergonomically, the case isn’t bad at all. It adds a bit of bulk to the phone, but it still goes in my front jeans pocket comfortably. It has a glossy plastic finosh tjat feels almost identical to the back of tje 3g iphone. I’ve found that the extra size actually makes the iPhone more comfortable to type on with my biggish hands.

The price is on the steep side at $79, but it doesn’t seem exorbitant to me given the functionality. I don’t like that the USB cable has an uncommon-shaped plug on it, but it does work as a passthrough docking cable.

I’m only a few days into owning the thing, too, so this review is really more of a ‘first impressions’ than a thorough review. Those things said, though, I’m quite impressed with this product and glad I dropped the cash on it.

Check it out at the apple store or mophie.com

First Impressions of Salt Lake City

We got in to SLC yesterday night, and so far, it’s a pleasant place. The scenery is impressive, with snow-capped peaks as a backdrop to just about every viewable angle. Streets in the downtown area we’re staying in are enormously wide – you feel like you’re crossing a football field every time you traverse one. Lots of really drunk bums panhandling the downtown area, too, way more than I’ve seen in any East Coast city in recent years.

We hit a couple of brewpubs in the area last night, Red Rock & Squatters. They were both agreeable joints, the beer was palatable if not terribly adventurous (in keeping with a typical brewpub mass-appeal sensibility), and the food was decent, too. Alcohol
Content in them seemed really low (a Utah-specific regulated thing, maybe? Idk.). We went to check out a couple of other dive bars, but you apparently need a $5 “membership” to enter them? On a dead Wednesday night? Lame.

Dear NHL

 

come on, now

Dear NHL,

For the love of god, won’t you hire a stylist for Ovechkin? Buy him a razor? Or at least pick him up a bottle of the sort of shampoo that’s made for oily hair?  The greatest talent in the league has got to be worth at least THAT much. We’re trying to improve the league’s image, remember?

*Note that I’m not suggesting you queer-eye him all up and make him kiss himself in the mirror or anything. But he’s gotta be able to do better than a rental tux that your average self-respecting 16 year old would turn down.

EXPUNGED

In case you’re wondering where I vanished to on Facebook, the answer is this: I’m taking a break from it for a while. Nothing particularly emo or anything, but the layer of abstraction that I formerly maintained between the Internet, other friends, colleagues, and my actual life has blurred a bit too much.

I de-friended all the people that I only know from the Internet, as well as those who I haven’t spoken to since high school (no offense if you fall into the former category, tough titty if the latter). I kept family and colleagues and rl friends on there, but for all practical purposes, I’ve abandoned the site.

I had briefly considered creating a second facebook account so I could maintain the constitutionally-prescribed separation of dick jokes and family/coworkers, but –nah. Truth is, I’ve never really liked facebook. Maybe someday facebook will do a redesign that more adequately allows me to compartmentalize various segments of my life. Until then…

enough of that twitter nonsense

makes for horrible, pointless blog updates.

God I hate twitter.  It fucked up the web.

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Tweets for Today

• 00:13 Watching Cops because it always makes me feel better about my life  #
• 01:01 Chewie take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive. #
• 04:08 @Stabby_ million $ idea: drive-thru tattoo parlors.

  Stucco optional. #

• 15:31 What’s the desktop twitter client of choice nowadays?  #
• 15:38 @pebkac just wondering if anything new has come along. Also twhirl is better than twitteriffic anyway. #
• 19:25 Punisher: War Zone – worst movie ever? It’s like they used an actual comic book for their script. #
• 19:26 And the punisher comic always read like it was written by an angry, hormonal, 13 year old boy. #

Tweets for Today

• 14:54 Uconn: this year’s team doesn’t have that much horsepwer under the hood. Last night proves it.  #

Tweets for Today

• 00:20 why exactly did I just pay $3 to unlock emoji on my phone

  Because I’m awesome 
   #

• 13:50 Finally got around to watching ‘This is England’. Kinda depressing overall, but good.  #