Apple : Buying Guide: Best iPhone 4 battery case: 5 we recommend |
| Buying Guide: Best iPhone 4 battery case: 5 we recommend Posted: 27 Mar 2011 01:00 AM PDT  Like a good friend, your iPhone is there for you when you need it. Arrived in a new city and lost? Maps to the rescue! Want to find the time of your next train home? No problem. But unlike your best mate, the iPhone has a tendency to conk out at the worst moment if you've forgotten to charge its battery. The solution is a battery pack. These come in all shapes, sizes, colours and prices. We've gone for the case-style power pack, because we feel they're the most convenient, portable and robust you can get. Since they're designed to fit snugly, they're phone-specific, so make sure you get the right model for your iPhone. To help you choose, we've selected five for the iPhone 4 and another five for the iPhone 3G and 3GS, all available in the UK. There are other options that simply clip onto the bottom or your iPhone (or iPod or iPad, in some cases), or that you hook up to your dock connector with a lead. These aren't as handy for travelling, but you can get some with awesome capacity – have a look at the Just Mobile Gum Plus Power Pack (£57). This little baby's 4400mAh battery charged our iPhone fully and still claimed to have a near-full tank. We put each of the cases here through rigorous tests to discover how they perform in the real-world. The testing process was done on an eight-month-old iPhone 3GS and an iPhone 4 with three months on the clock. Both phones' batteries have run up a fair few charge cycles, so your results may differ from ours because your battery's in a different state of health. But our results give a good indication of the relative performance of each case. We measured how much charge each pack could push into a dead iPhone, then timed how long it took to charge the pack and the phone fully – useful to know if you're off somewhere and want to go out with as much charge as possible. Finally, we left the guided tour of Unreal's Epic Citadel running, which really mashes away at the processor and hence battery – a true acid test. Let's see how they fared. For iPhone 4
Dexim Supercharged Leather Power Case - £60
Mophie Juice Pack Air - iPhone 4 - £70
Mili Power Spring 4 - £47
Exogear Exolife - £60
Logic3 PowerSleeve for iPhone 4 - £30 For iPhone 3G/3GS
Logic3 Power Case - £30
7dayshop iPower External Battery Case - £11
Dexim BluePack S4 - £25
Mili Power Spring Case for iPhone 3G/3GS - £43
Mophie Juice Pack Air - iPhone 3G & 3GS - £40 Test 1 - Battery power We plugged the full battery pack into a dead iPhone and left it to charge with the phone on, but the display off. The battery percentage reading was taken from the iPhone as soon as the battery case was empty. The high-capacity Dexim came out top; the Exogear was surprisingly low.
Test 2 - Battery charge time We plugged a dead battery and dead iPhone into a 500mA USB port on our Mac and timed how long it took for both to charge fully. Don't hold your breath, because it ain't quick. The Mophie did well but the Logic3 was fastest. It's not the whole story though – look at test three.
Test 3 - Extra power With the pack and iPhone charged, we left the guided tour of Unreal's Epic Citadel running with sound muted, and timed how much extra time we got with the battery compared to the iPhone on its own. This is where the differences really showed up.
Test 4 - Design and Features We like Dexim's flip-case design for the screen protection it offers, though it's the bulkiest of the ones on test, doesn't grip the phone well and the flip clip isn't particularly elegant. The Mili's one-piece spring clip, which hooks over the top of the iPhone, is a nice idea that just doesn't work, because it kept coming loose in our pocket, and the Exogear's clip-on ring is functional but flimsy. The case is mighty thin, though. Our favourites are the Logic3 and the Mophie: the former because of its one-piece design; the latter because it's so solid, looks the part and has a nice rubber back. All five have a power switch, so you can decide when to use the charge in the battery to boost your iPhone. With the Mili, it won't start charging until you press its On button, but you can't then stop it without removing the iPhone – less elegant than the others. And all but the Dexim have a strip of lights that show you how much juice is in the battery. The Dexim does have a light to tell you if it's charging (orange) or full (green), but the light colour changes depending on your angle of view. Frus-tra-ting.
And the best iPhone 4 battery case is… Mophie Juice Pack Air £70 The Mophie's performance and design panache make it a worthy winner This test has brought out a surprising trait in us – we've started to sympathise with the X Factor judges. When faced with two completely different choices, each with its own distinct strengths, how do you pick between them? Unlike Messrs Cowell et al., we were picking between the top two rather than the bottom pair, and we had longer than they did to deliberate which was to be our victor. But it was tough. While we liked the phenomenal capacity and added use time of the Dexim, its design lacks finesse, and since you've got a stylish and well-designed phone, you need a case to match. For the same reason, we didn't feel the Mili and Exogear packs were quite up to scratch, despite the former's impressive additional use time. And so we were left with our final-two conundrum. As we said in the design test, we were impressed by the Logic3 and Mophie in equal measure, and felt both were a worthy complement to the iPhone's sleek looks. In terms of how much juice they pumped into the phone, they were practically identical, and they were the two quickest-charging packs we tested. So it came down to whether the Mophie's more-than-double additional use time justified its more-than-double price tag. Let's first say that we do think £70 is too expensive and that at £30, the Logic3 is an attractive option if you're on a tight budget. But at the end of the day, if you're going to shell out on a battery case, it's because you're the sort of heavy iPhone user who regularly finds your battery running out, so the more additional use time you get, the better. And while the Mophie isn't top of the table in this sense, it offers the best overall balance of great design and good performance. It protects your phone well, is solidly built but still thin, oozes class and gives you plenty of extra time to enjoy all that's great about your iPhone.
Test 1 - Battery power We plugged the full battery pack into a dead iPhone and left it to charge with the phone on, but the display off. The battery percentage reading was taken from the iPhone as soon as the battery case was empty. The 7dayshop iPower, despite being good on paper, performed poorly.
Test 2 - Battery charge time We plugged a dead battery and dead iPhone into a 500mA USB port on our Mac and timed how long it took for both to charge fully. Don't hold your breath, because it ain't quick, though we were impressed by the Mili's time and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Mophie's.
Test 3 - Extra power With the pack and iPhone charged, we left the guided tour of Unreal's Epic Citadel running with sound muted, and timed how much extra time we got with the battery compared to the iPhone on its own. As you can see, it was largely much of a muchness.
Test 4 - Design and Features You will notice that the Logic3 and Dexim leather cases are virtually identical, the only significant differences being the type of leather coating and the fact that the Dexim has a velcro clasp while the Logic3 has a magnet. We preferred the latter. But both these cases are bulkier than the Mili and Mophie ones. The Mili clip-on design that didn't work with the iPhone 4 grips the 3G/3GS much better: it also leaves the iPhone's sidemounted buttons more accessible. The Mophie looks similar to the Mili but the top is a separate slide-on piece. The Mili, 7dayshop iPower and Mophie packs have a strip of lights to show you the charge level, and we like the Mophie's best because the button's easier to press than the Mili. The Logic3 and Dexim ones only have a status light that doesn't show you how much juice they still have in the tank. All five have switches so that you can decide when to use the juice in the pack, although the only way to cut off power with the Mili is to remove the phone. One nice feature of the 7dayshop iPower is how it'll charge other USB devices.
And the best iPhone 3G/3GS battery case is… Mili Power Spring £43 In a close-run contest, the convenience of speedy charging is worth the extra cash We've agonised long and hard about this one. Let's first explain why we didn't go for the 7dayshop iPower case. Yes, it only costs about a tenner, and from a pounds-per-additional-minute-of-use perspective, it's great value for money. But then if you're investing in a battery pack, why do the half-hearted thing of getting one that delivered so much less extra use time compared to the others? If you're gonna do something, do it properly! So our attention turns to the others. In terms of how much charge they gave our iPhone and the additional use time they provided, there's nothing really to choose between them. If we were interested purely in these two things, the Logic3 case would be a good bet (we preferred its magnet clasp to the Dexim's velcro). We like the flip-case style despite the extra bulk, and its modest £30 pricetag is reasonable. But even with this, we can't help feeling you'd be better off shelling out an additional £13 for the Mili, and here's why. Granted, you don't get any additional capacity or video time at the top-end of the price scale, but the Mili and Mophie products have three distinct advantages. First, there's the charge level indicator, which we find incredibly useful, and the fact that they're much lighter. But more importantly, look at those charge times. They're both significantly less than the Logic3 and Dexim efforts. And we like that, because if you've only got a short time to get your phone charged before you go out, speed matters and these guys deliver. While some of the minutiae on the Mophie are better implemented (the on/off switch and the charge level button, for example), the Mili's quicker charge time, coupled with the handier one-piece design and the way the iPhone's buttons were easier to press with the case on are what swung us in its favour.
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| Buying Guide: 7 best iPhone platform games Posted: 26 Mar 2011 11:00 PM PDT  Nintendo has quite a lot in common with Apple. Both companies are innovators in their chosen fields, developing and selling profitable consumer hardware, backed by unique intellectual property that simply cannot be found on other platforms. In the same way that you won't find Apple's iLife suddenly available for Windows, you won't see Mario, Nintendo's famous plumber, in a game on iOS (or any other non-Nintendo platform) any time soon. Luckily, though, there are plenty of games available for iOS that are in a similar vein to Nintendo's Super Mario Bros, providing a more than adequate fix for platform-game fanatics. Probably the closest gaming experience to Super Mario Bros on iOS is Giana Sisters, (£2.99) a title that has something of a chequered past. The original version of the game was released way back in 1987 for the Commodore 64 and other home micros of the day, but rapidly found itself in a one-sided battle with Nintendo's Legal Hammer of Doom. (To be fair to Nintendo, Giana Sisters offers very similar gameplay to Super Mario Bros, including block-smashing, jumping on enemies and altered-state power-up; and some of the early backgrounds and maps are eerily similar to those in Nintendo's game.) Very few copies of Giana Sisters made it to stores before it was recalled and deleted, and its rarity ensured the game cult status. Oddly, Nintendo soon gave up trying to batter into submission other Mario clones on 8-bit systems.
Over 20 years later, and Nintendo appeared to have forgotten its spat with the punchy female Mario impersonators, and Giana Sisters cautiously crept on to the Nintendo DS, with spruced-up graphics, level design and controls. In 2010, the game made the leap to iOS, boasting new graphics, 80 levels, 32 'retro' levels, and a remixed soundtrack based on the original C64 score. Fortunately, the conversion was a success. The game is a highly enjoyable romp through varied and challenging environments, and, for the most part, the controls are tight enough (and the level design forgiving enough) that you never want to hurl your device out of the window due to being 'unfairly' killed. And while the game gets very tough later on, canny players can amass a huge number of extra lives by collecting the diamonds sprinkled around each level. Pizza Boy (£1.19) is a similar if rather smaller game. The story is amusingly throwaway compared to the high drama of Princess Peach being kidnapped for the umpteenth time in practically every Mario game. Instead, the eponymous hero is giving a pizza to his love when it's snatched by a bird.
You have to work your way through levels packed full of spikes and hostile animals, to catch up with the tormenting avian, who'll fly away again when you approach. Despite only boasting a dozen levels, we found Pizza Boy a tough challenge; there's the odd bit of cheap level design (areas clearly designed to kill you), but it looks great, plays well, has unique features (such as stomping on soda machines that spit out bottles you can collect to hurl at foes), rewards perseverance, and offers bonuses for bettering your scores during repeated plays. Elsewhere, other iOS games offer 2D platform mechanics, but also take inspiration from later platform games. Frogatto (59p) resembles somewhat sedate quest-oriented Sega platform games such as Alex Kidd in Miracle World. The amphibian hero is placed in the middle of an adventure that finds him working to unravel a dastardly plot against his townspeople.
You still get plenty of Mario-style leaping-about action, but there are also characters to meet, puzzles to solve and occasional boss fights, making the game a refreshing change from others in the genre. Also, you don't jump on heads to dispatch adversaries - instead, Frogatto in gruesome fashion sucks in foes and spits them at other enemies, in a manner not entirely dissimilar to Nintendo stalwart and second-division player Kirby. For Soosiz (£1.19) and They Need To Be Fed (59p), Super Mario Galaxy could be considered the catalyst. Nintendo's 2007 Wii title took Mario into space, exploring tiny planets that each have their own gravitational field. It's an interesting idea, and it works brilliantly when welded to a 2D platform game more akin to the original Super Mario Bros.
In Soosiz, your little ball with feet has to locate his chums, while avoiding or jumping on bad guys and grabbing coins; so far, so Mario. But as soon as you start playing and the tiny world you're on spins about its axis as you run, you know Soosiz isn't another me-too game; the weird gravity hugely adds to the challenge, forcing you to take risks and regularly disorienting you. (While you can tap the zoom button to find out in which direction your pals are located, you need serious navigational skills to keep track once you've jumped between a few mini planets.) Mercifully, the controls are extremely simple (left, right, jump) and tight, so you've only yourself to blame if your ball ends up flying off into space rather than safely landing on terra firma. They Need To Be Fed is in a similar space, but distills everything to its purest essence. There's no accidentally flying off into space, and clockwork-like level structures are the order of the day; in a sense, there's a cleanness and precision to the level design that recalls platform games that pre-date the original Super Mario Bros. (such as 8-bit classic Pitfall!), and while it's quite short, They Need To Be Fed is great fun and stylish to boot.
But no round-up of platform games would be complete without Tap! favourite Pix'N Love Rush (59p) , which combines platforming action with the quick-fire level gameplay mechanics found in the likes of Nintendo's WarioWare. Instead of providing horizontally scrolling levels that you can tackle at a somewhat leisurely pace, Pix'N Love Rush continually reinvents itself. One minute, it's a simplified Super Mario Bros platform game; the next, it's scrolling up, like Doodle Jump or Rainbow Islands; then it's static, like the original Mario Bros or Bubble Bobble. Essentially, it's all the best 2D platform games you've ever played, fired at your brain at breakneck speed - utterly brilliant and a steal at 59p. In fact, the value of the games in this feature is astonishing - the shopping list's total price is just a quarter of the RRP of the 2006 Nintendo DS version of Super Mario Bros. Finally, a little nod to iPad owners. We've so far only mentioned iPhone/iPod touch games, because retro-oriented platform games are more suited to smaller handheld devices; however, iPad owners aren't left out. Giana Sisters HD (also £2.99) matches the iPhone version and handily provides custom controls, Soosiz and They Need To Be Fed both exist in 'HD' form for £1.19 each, and Pix'N Love Rush works surprisingly well in 2x mode. |
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