Powering your devices while on the go — Morphie Powerstation review

Earli­er this year, I atten­ded SXSWi (South by South­W­est inter­act­ive) and immersed myself in social media, gami­fic­a­tion, and tech­no­logy. Oh yeah, there was the odd party or two 😉

Being that this was my first time in Aus­tin, I relied heav­ily on my tech­no­logy to keep me on sched­ule and help me nav­ig­ate this unfa­mil­i­ar city. Using 4G was a treat, the best I get back home in Edmon­ton is 3G. But boy, does nav­ig­a­tion really suck up the band­width. And power! 

Yet, in order to be effect­ive at that crazy SXSWi you have to be at all the events all over the con­ven­tion core. And the tech is on *all the time*.

Which meant that while I was mobile, I was using up my iPhone’s bat­tery faster than I nor­mally do.

Luck­ily for me, I’d taken the excel­lent advice of Liz Strauss and picked up a Morph­ie Juice box — basic­ally just a very smart, fast char­ging bat­tery box that’s pretty much the same size and shape as an iPhone 4.

And it works, as advert­ised. Kept me mobile and my devices in use — I wasn’t tethered to a wall out­let for sig­ni­fic­ant peri­ods of time — as many oth­er seemed to be.

Ini­tially char­ging the 400mAh bat­tery pack took around four hours, using my iPhone char­ger adapter and an included mini-USB cord. The Power­sta­tion doesn’t come with it’s own wall adapter; use your own.

Then, it’s basic­ally pack and for­get it, until you need to juice up your iOS device (yep, it’ll power an iPad too, but it won’t give you a full charge).

I didn’t test it on oth­er devices, but any­thing with a USB char­ging sys­tem could likely be powered. PCMag.com offers the fol­low­ing detail on that:

With its 4000mAh bat­tery, the Power­sta­tion helped a Droid RAZR get 5 hours, 13 minutes more of sol­id LTE stream­ing, and let an iPad 1 watch video for 4 hours, 16 minutes more than before. 

Over­all I like it. Small, does what it advert­ises, and (as long as I remem­ber to charge it) is ready to power and charge my iOS devices when I’m out and about, and run­ning low. A good $70 investment.