Media Tools

Mophie Space Pack

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Phone case with battery and extra storage

Lately I’ve been buying card magic instructional DVDs (I recommend the Royal Road To Card Magic by R. Paul Wilson 5-DVD Boxed Set in conjunction with the classic book of the same name). I wanted to watch these DVDs on my iPhone while on a plane, so I used Handbrake, a free open source video transcoder, to rip the DVDs into MP4 files.

But the standard way to get movies on an iPhone is to use iTunes. I don’t like using iTunes as much as I used to. It’s become a bloated, confusing catch-all. Apple needs to reboot iTunes.

The Mophie Space pack lets me avoid using iTunes. It’s a protective case for the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s that contains a 1700mAh battery and 16GB of built-in storage. That’s enough for about 7 hours of video.

Transferring video files couldn’t be simpler. The storage shows up as a hard drive on your computers desktop when you connect your phone. It’s a simple matter to drag MP4 files (or any other kind of file) into the drive. Then, I can watch the movies using the Mophie Space app on my phone (it has its own player). The battery doubles the energy capacity of the phone, too, which means I can watch videos on a long flight and still have juice to summon Uber when I my plane lands.

The Mophie Space Pack also comes in handy when I’m on my computer and I come across an MP3 of a podcast or interview I want to listen to later. I just drag the file into the storage icon and it will be on my phone when I’m ready to listen.

phone-grab

-- Mark Frauenfelder 11/13/14

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