Short Version: Equal parts backup battery and iPhone dock, Dexim’s $55 P-Flip Foldable Power Dock serves as a nice daily desk accessory and then easily pulls double duty as a portable travelling companion.
Review:
Guess what? There are a million iPhone accessories. And it’s not easy to stand out in the crowd if you’re a company that makes iPhone accessories. But sometimes the best course is to offer a simple solution that addresses more than one need for the common iPhone owner and to offer your product at a decent price.
In this case, Dexim has merged a small, unobtrusive iPhone dock with a portable backup battery. Exciting? Not really, but it doesn’t have to be because, at $55, you’re getting two accessories in one for close to the price of most competing backup battery offerings.
The dock is compatible with the iPhone 3G and 3GS and all generations of the iPod touch. The battery pack is 2000mAh, which is about 1.5 times the capacity of the iPhone’s internal battery. So you get about a charge and a half out of the dock. A full recharge of my iPhone 3GS took about an hour and a half.
Dexim rates the product as capable of 8 hours talk time, 15 hours of video, 15 hours of gaming, or 60 hours of music. I can confirm the 60 hours of music claim. I set my phone into airplane mode (turns off all data connections) and let it play music nonstop starting Friday night after work and noticed it had finally petered out on Monday morning. Side note: going without a phone for an entire weekend is weird for most of Saturday morning but becomes pretty nice after a while.
The dock folds down to a very manageable travel size and can itself be recharged with a mini-USB cable. If you dock your phone into it while it’s charging, you’re able to synch with iTunes and all that good stuff.
The main downside is that if you use any sort of protective case, you’ll have to remove it in order to charge up your battery on the go. That’s the tradeoff for having a backup battery that doubles as a dock, though. Also, the $55 price tag may seem a bit high at first glance but considering that a fair amount of competing backup batteries go for around $50, the added bonus of the docking feature makes for a pretty decent purchase.
P-Flip Foldable Power Dock [Dexim]
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