While Apple is busy building unsightly humpbacked battery packs, other companies in the market haven’t broken stride. There is little question that Apple stands to steal a healthy chunk of external battery business from rivals by promoting its own solution over others, but there are rival cases that are far more innovative and offer much better performance. There are also many consumers — myself included — who don’t want to bulk up their iPhones with a big thick battery case, so external battery packs are a better option.
Mophie is a longtime leader in the space and if you’re after an external battery pack with build quality and a design that matches your iPhone (or Android phone) instead of giving it a hunchback, you’ve just found your next smartphone accessory.
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Despite the new pressure from Apple as it enters the battery case space, Mophie continues to push along. In fact, just today the company announced its first ever wireless charging battery case. But personally, I’m not a fan of battery cases — even the slimmest ones out there add too much bulk for my taste.
I still need a solution that will let me charge my phone on the go though, especially considering the fact that my main phone is an iPhone 6s. On a busy day, the 6s battery doesn’t even last until nightfall. So I carry an external battery with me and I plug in whenever I need a boost. I’ve gone through several different products over the years, but something tells me they’ll all be gathering dust in a closet for a long time to come.
Mophie recently sent me a Powerstation 5X to test and it didn’t take me long to decide that this the only battery pack I’ll be carrying for the foreseeable future.
The Powerstation 5X holds 10,000 mAh of power and can fully charge my iPhone 6s more than four times before needing to be recharged itself, but it’s still sleek and slim at just 9.9mm thick. That’s less than 3mm thicker than my iPhone, in fact. There are also four other versions of the Powerstation for people who want more juice (the bigger one has 15,000 mAh) or for those who would rather have a more compact unit (2,000 mAh, 4,000 mAh and 6,000 mAh versions are available).
There are two USB charging ports so you can fuel up more than one device at a time, and one of the ports supports 15W fast charging.
Mophie’s Powerstations start at $39.95 for the 2,000 mAh version and go up to $149.95 for the 15,000 mAh version, which is called the Powerstation 8X. The 10,000 mAh Powerstation 5X I’m using costs $129.95, and I find it to be the perfect balance between portability and capacity.
