Upon first glance, mophie‘s rugged battery-charged case looks like many of its siblings: a stylish battery pack for stylish iPhones.
But with the company’s latest addition, the juice pack plus outdoor edition, mophie has found a new way to innovate its line of power accessories. The key lies in an app.
Along with the super-charged case, the mophie outdoor app transforms the iPhone to a dedicated GPS device, designed to work where cell phone towers don’t exist. Purchase of the outdoor juice pack, which retails for $119.95, includes a one-year premium subscription ($29.99 value) to the app’s 5 million square miles of high-resolution maps covering the continental U.S. and Hawaii — mophie claims its app has the most complete public land-management dataset on any device. The maps bring you down to the trail-level zoom, at 1:8000 scale. Maps are divided into grids, each of which can be downloaded individually to conserve space on the iPhone.
But the app isn’t just practical. It’s meant to be fun. Its tracking feature lets you record a detailed map of your progress, speed, distance, elevation and geo-tagged photos. The app can also help you find the best trails for hiking, with more than 1.2 million points of interest. Plus, the mophie outdoor app also makes it easy for you to share your journey with friends via Facebook or email.
If all these features sound battery draining, no worries. At the heart of mophie’s products is hours of battery life — in this case 2000 mAh, or about eight hours of talk time on 3G.
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