Last week, I wrote about live streaming video from your car and in doing so, I mentioned something that helped my iPhone 3G keep powered up for the ride. That device is the Mophie Juice Pack for iPhone 3G from a company called mStation.

No, you can’t drink it
The Juice Pack for iPhone 3G is a device, not an actual juice pack that you can drink. A few people had to ask when I said things like “One second, I need to grab my Juice Pack”. The Juice Pack is actually a pretty sleek device and I had heard of it before, but hadn’t thought much about the need for it. When I got it, I also noticed that it looked like it could be a bit bulky. Basically, it’s a battery that your iPhone 3G slides into and it more than double’s the battery life of your phone.

The Juice Pack is very elegant in its design. If I had a decent budget to design a wrap-around style battery, this is pretty much the ideal. The added height is minimal, as is the thickness (for the capacity). It’s not very heavy, but the thickness is definitely noticeable. If keeping your pocket weight down to a minimum is a high priority, you might have to just talk and play less on your iPhone. It’s black on the outside, which matched my phone, but won’t match all phones. The color inside (which is hidden while in use) is a bright green, which just screams “energy” to me. The bottom contains the pass-through USB connection to charge and sync and on the back is a power indicator with four LEDs. When you press the button on the back, anywhere from one to four LEDs will light up depending on how much juice is left in your pack. If the aesthetics are important to you, I’m not sure you’ll find a better-looking battery supplement. I should add that they make Juice Packs for both generations of the iPhone as well as the iPod Touch and have a $79 Juice Pack Air coming soon.

How well does it work?
In my test, I didn’t notice it. That is to say that I mostly forgot it was wrapped around my iPhone, feeding it power. One of the things that I’ve noticed draining my battery quickly is prolonged video recording and playing or anything that constantly updates the screen like video. This is why the streaming video experiment was a good test. When I started out from my house, the iPhone battery and the Juice Pack were both about 100% charged up. I recorded (and streamed via 3G) audio and video of my drive to work which took about 20 minutes. When I had arrived at my office, I removed the Juice Pack and checked both it and the iPhone. My iPhone was at 100% still because, as I used it, the Juice Pack was constantly recharging it. The Juice Pack was about half full. At this rate, I could probably stream video for an hour with a fully charged iPhone and Juice Pack.

Conclusion
With a price tag of $99, you’re not going to get away with one of these cheap, but if you’re like me and you’re on your iPhone every ten minutes checking email, playing games, updating Twitter, etc., it is a very attractive option to keep you running while on the go. Compared to other devices that don’t integrate anywhere near as smoothly as the Juice Pack and that cost about $50-$80 for similar battery life, this is a nice upgrade for a little more money.

On a side note, if you buy from the Mophie web site, you might be able to tack on a good deal on another accessory. At the time of this writing, I noticed a clearance section of the site with a bunch of stuff for $0.99.

View the rest of the photos on Flickr

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