This is Todd Ogasawara on MobileViews.com. And if you’ve got an iPhone 3G, you know that your battery’s going to be used up very fast if you have the GSM radio, Bluetooth radio, WiFi radio and 3G radio all turned on at once or even any combination of them. So until now, I’ve been using this which is an APC USB battery pack. It will charge anything that can take a USB input for a charge and works pretty well but well it’s a little clunky I mean you need this, you need the cable, you need an iPhone of course to charge up or anything else. I mean that’s a nice thing about this, it will charge pretty much anything that can be charged with a USB.
In the old days, there used to be a thing called a sled and this is an iPAQ, let’s get the iPhone underway. This is an old iPAQ 3850. You can see how it looks like compared to iPhone 3G, a bit bigger and so a sled is a bit bigger. It’s actually kind of interesting because you could actually take an entire PC card as you can see. And so you could use it with a memory card like this one, a whole 64 MB large and it also had a removable battery so that it could charge up iPAQ 3850, provide a bit of additional life and this thing did not last very long to be honest. And it was nice to have because you could actually carry it around and had protective screen. It was a good idea, gigantic of course but it’s still a good idea. Here’s this thing compared to the iPhone 3G by the way, there you go.
Okay, so recently I got the Case-Mate Fuel for the iPhone 3G and this is what it looks like. You can see the connector there, it’s got a push button here, little green light right there that tells you that it’s fully charged and then ready to take care of the iPhone 3G. Just slide it right in like that, it’s a pretty snug fit, it’s got a built clip and as you can see it’s a bit smaller, and I checked out—iPAQ 3850 combo. And the surprising thing about this is that it’s actually quite light. I was actually pretty surprised how light this case with the battery in it is and I was expecting something a lot heavier so that was pretty nice. It charged up my phone under two hours. I think it’s about an hour and 45 minutes. And it still had the battery charge left. After charging a phone I was just discharged down to about 33% of batteries. This is about 33%, this is full charge to back up the phone and I think they still had about maybe 30% to 50% charge level although it has three lights so it’s hard to tell.
Well, you could probably provide an additional boost of power had I needed it. I’m really pretty pleased with this but there are a couple things, one is if you have any built clip, you’re going to have to press down on the iPhone like this to unclip it and I’m little worried about the pressure it places on the iPhone right there. I’m going to mention this to Case-Mate when I contact them to let them know them what this video review is up, and other thing of course is that your screen is naked. And I kind of wish they might add something like an invisishield or maybe even a little cover like this that could optionally protect the screen a bit more when it’s sitting, pointing outwards from your body clip to your belt.
But otherwise it’s a great idea, it’s very light, it works, it actually charged up my phone from 33% to full in a reasonable amount of time with a little bit of power left over. And I’m pretty happy to have this to use right now because you know although this is handy to carry, it’s reasonably small, it actually probably takes a slightly less base there and it can charge other things. Sometimes you just want to have something clipped to your belt and it doesn’t get used until it’s turned on like this. As you can see it’s charging up my phone right now and it’s Case-Mate fuel for the iPhone 3G, it’s a clip on case with a battery pack built in to it.
Todd Ogasarawa, MobileViews.com, talk to you later.
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