Mediaboss Marketing

How much will you pay for design? The $79.95 Mophie Juice Pack Powerstation gives you less battery life than competing products, but it's a lot prettier. Whether that's worth it is up to you.

The Juice Pack Powerstation is an attractive little soft-touch rectangle at 2.3 by 4.1 by .5 inches (HWD) and 4.3 ounces. Like most Mophie products, it's very elgantly designed, with a silver band around the edge that echoes the iPhone 4/4S case. There are full-sized and MicroUSB ports on the top, and a single button on the side that lights up a line of four green LEDs to show the battery's stored charge.

The Powerstation doesn't come with a power adapter; you're supposed to charge it by plugging it into a PC or using an existing USB power adapter you have lying around. Unlike the Tylt Energi ($39.99, 3.5 stars) and Zagg Zaggsparq 2.0 ($99, 3 stars), the Powerstation doesn't function as a travel adapter to charge your gadgets from an AC jack, either. That seems a chintzy omission for an $80 product. It took about four hours to charge, shorter than the same-capacity Energizer XP4001 ($49.95).

With its 4000mAh battery, the Powerstation helped a Droid RAZR ($199, 4.5 stars) get 5 hours, 13 minutes more of solid LTE streaming, and let an iPad 1 (4.5 stars) watch video for 4 hours, 16 minutes more than before. That's less performance than we saw from the 4000mAh Energizer XP4001 ($49.95, 3.5 stars) and from the 5000mAh, $79.99 Editor's Choice Sanyo eneloop Mobile Booster (4 stars).

But it could still be enough. Four hours of added juice is probably enough to make it to where you're going, whether that's through a cross-country flight or past a long day on the road. We think the Energizer and Sanyo batteries are better value for the money here, but if the Powerstation's elegant design appeals to you, that would make it worth the coin.

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Mophie Juice Pack Powerstation