Improve Battery Life – 3 iPhone Battery Extensions Reviewed
August 12, 2008 by Ryan Ray
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The love of the iPhone 3G is immense, that is if you put aside one glaring issue… BATTERY LIFE!! GPS is great to have. It’s saved my tail many of times from becoming lost. Even this very weekend I used my iPhone’s GPS to get us around Indiana. If you weren’t aware I played in a band for a charity event in Indiana, and I live in Missouri. I used the GPS to find food, to find guitar strings, and even to give my friends directions via twittelator. Besides GPS the 3G network speed is wonderful. It’s so easy to surf the web or download email, even many of the apps I use load much faster now as the data they require zips over 3G. But what do you get for using all of these feautures? That’s right, battery life gets sucked down the drain. Almost as quick as you can say, “WTF, how come my iPhone is about to die?!”
Don’t fear though I’m here to rescue us all from iPhone despair. I’ve got what looks like to me the top 3 battery extenders for the iPhone. These are simply extra bulky packs of juice that your iPhone can use to power itself for just a little longer. Hopefully just long enough to get you to an outlet. Now I made a 6 + hour trip with my iPhone on just about the whole time, but I really had to watch the battery carefully. I would have killed to have one of these battery extenders. I even may buy one of these soon, so if you want to send one to me just let me know! 
Alright let’s check out these battery extenders, these all use the dock connection so it should work with 1st and 2nd generation iPhones. I’m sure even iPod Touch owners can use these.
I picked this one first as it was the first iPhone battery extender to be certified by Apple. They have a wonderful website and they have many different versions of this sled that fits every iPhone and iPod Touch made. They claim for the iPhone 3G that it will additionally add 350 hours of standby, 6 hours of talk on 3G and 12 on 2G, 6 hours on 3G and 7 on Wifi, 28 hours of audio, and finally 8 hours of video. It’s pre-order only at the moment and cost a cool 99.95. I am definitely thinking about choosing this one. The most expensive, but it looks great and adds a great amount of battery life.
This is the only one on sale at the Apple store, atleast online it is. It’s made by Kensington who makes all sorts of iAccessories for just about everything. This battery pack plugs in to your standard outlet and once it’s charged you plug the pack into your iPhone with the dock connection to USB cable. To me this isn’t as smooth as the sled but it works for many people. The good thing about this is that it’s a multi-use battery pack. It can charge any dock connecting device. It can even charge anything else that uses a USB cord as thats how you connect whatever device it is to the pack. This is what makes me want this device more than the sled at times. It can charge anything and might come quite in handy when I’m carrying other devices that need a charge besides my iPhone. Kensington claims you will get an additional 100 hours of music, 21 hours of video, or 6 hours of talk. They don’t disclose anything else and I wish they would. It looks as if this could be a more powerful battery though as the sled only offers 8 hours of video and 28 hours of audio compared to the Kensington pack. This will cost you 69.95
This is the final battery pack that I have deemed worthy for the iPhone, and it comes from Richard Solo. This pack has a built in dock connection so there are no cables to mess with, but the pack does/will seem awkward if you are trying to talk on your phone as you have this huge chunk of a battery pack added to the bottom of the phone. Just check out the picture below to see what I’m saying. On the website there aren’t any solid numbers to judge this pack from. It only claims to double your battery life you currently get. It does seem as a semi-vague description of the device. None the less this external pack gets the job done, and only cost you 49.95. The cheapest pack of them all, which price can be the deciding factor on things like this.
Now mind you there are many other packs out there for your iPhone/iPod but these are the ones I picked to be the safest and best value to your device. All of them I know for sure are certified by Apple to be safe for your iPhone. This means their circuitry is smart enough to not ruin your iPhone battery or the battery pack itself. It knows when to quit charging and save it’s own juice. So it’s all up to you to pick which pack you want the most and get it! I like them all and am having a hard time deciding so help me out. Let me know what you think about these. While you are at it check out our videos and our RSS feed. I personally think you should subscribe to both! Thanks everyone.
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I chose the RichardSolo over the Mophie for two reasons: I did not like the fact that the rubberized paint rubs off the Mophie’s corners (other reviewers complained about this), and that it does not really charge up the iPhone and the backup battery at the same time like the RichardSolo does. They also are known for terrific customer service at richardsolo.com — and that’s important to me, way beyond batteries. Plus, for the price of one Mophie I got TWO Solo’s. My opinion, for what it’s worth.
Very nice Reed!
This is the kind of experience I like to hear about. So did you try out a Mophie sled at one time to experience the paint rubbing off. I agree with you about how important customer service is. Thanks for the awesome comment!
Check out the new iBoost iphone battery extender cradle
3000mAh of power !
$60 is a great deal !
A beautiful gadget to have