Getting extra talk time, surfing or game play may be your ticket to maintaing waiting room sanity. The magazines are 7 years old, teeming with bacteria and you know, it’s old news. so is your iPhone running out of juice. PowerSkin on the other hand, is like that backpack reserve you keep with you in stealth mode, boosting your inexplicably insatiable need to remain online at all times. If your mobile is your primary point of contact between you and the outside world, this handy little pack will cut you some slack. It’ll keep you talking about 6 hours more than before. is it for you? It depends how long you want to go.
Design and DurabilityThis case is better suited to a pro who is on the road often, every day, where aesthetics are thrown out the door in exchange for performance, reliability and uptime. You’re once dead sexy slim i4 has been taken back in time, it is now a brick. But a brick with 4000mAh of lithium that will be there to see you through any task.
Silicon is a wonderful thing, its squishy and absorbs impacts quite well. some formulations of it tend to pick up dirt and dust quite easily though, this is one of those. The majority of of the PowerSkin is sheathed in this softer silicon that acts like a dirt tack. The bottom half where your extra power is stored uses a harder “soft touch” plastic that is quite convincibly blended together without too much of a change in feel. as soon as I took it out of the packaging it started clinging to dust. you know what i’m talking about, this is one of these. But on the other hand, it fits nearly perfect. since you have to shimmy your i4 in on an angle before snapping it in place, the horizontal edges do not sit entirely flush with the glass. We’re talking millimeters here, and it’s docked so the likelihood of it falling out is 0-none, what i’m saying is its not a solid tight fit like a snap together case. This can be a good thing, since it easily snaps in and pops up for you to remove at your convenience.
SpecificationsYou would think that simply doubling the battery of your i4 wouldn’t warrant a size increase of this magnitude, but it does. Double the power of your iPhone 4 with the PowerSkin and you’re near doubling its physical size too. you go from 93 cm (0.37 inch) up to 1.8 cm (0.70 inch), for some reason PowerSkin’s site shows the spec at 1.96 cm (0.77 inch), but my version was slightly slimmer at 0.16 cm (0.07 inch).
As for power spec, it’s a 2000 mAh NiMH battery, capable of charging itself with a 5V (500mA) draw, recharging you will happen twice as fast at 1000mA (website specs show 500mA, the unit we received was double). A micro-B USB port on the lower right corner plugs in to your computer allowing for charging the pack and syncing your i4 with iTunes.
Bottom LineFor $80 there are other options out there for the same price, same size, and you know, that do the same thing. This is one of your choices, do you want a more brick styled case or a beveled rounded 3G curve? This is a brick. It sits nicely on a desk, may fit fine in your inside pocket, but its going to make a huge bulge if you’re used to keeping your phone in your front pocket. aside from that, the battery life of your iPhone 4 is more than doubled, giving you twice the power you’ve become accustomed to.
