Recently, I
reviewed the Mophie Juice Pack 3G, which was an awesome external battery for the iPhone 3G which doubled its juice. Now, Mophie has recently launched the Juice Pack Touch 2G, which is an external battery option for iPod Touch 2G.
If you look at the pictures and site description, they look quite similar - but there’s a massive difference.
The color scheme is the same as the Mophie Juice Pack 3G but the dimensions vary greatly! This is due to the fact that the battery Touch 2G Juice Pack houses the battery at the bottom instead of back. This means that though it maintains the thin design of Touch 2G to a great extent but adds a lot to the height. Another reason for this could be the headphone port. In the iPhone 3G, the headphone port is at the top while in the Touch 2G, it’s at the bottom. As you plug in the Mophie, it will insert the headphone pin into the port, disabling the speaker, which means that the only way to listen to any kind of music or noise will be plugging in the earphone to the Mophie’s output. I don’t blame the company for this as the design by Apple makes the task really complex to achieve.
Another gripe I have with this Juice Pack is though it doubles the battery it puts the iPod on “power“ rather than “charging” it. It charges the iPod only when it’s attached to a PC, with iTunes installed, at the same time. When I asked the company about the issue, they informed me that the iPod Touch uses a different resistor from iPhone that causes it not to “charge”.
Overall, I have not had as great an experience with this Juice Pack as I did with the 3G one - but it’s still on my iPod all the time as I play a lot of games.
So, if you’re the same, the minor defects won’t hurt you. You can
get the Juice Pack 2G from Mophie for 99$, which is a bit more but I recommend it to the regular users and iPod gamers.
03-03-2009, 12:27 PM
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