There’s something to be said about well-built, well-designed iPhone car accessories
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Today we’re going to review two car accessories made by CaseCo. A minimalistic car mount and a portable battery pack that you can plug into your car’s cigarette lighter. If you’ve been watching our channel for the last while, you’ll know that CaseCo sent us a big box of stuff and we’ve been pretty impressed with their products.
The car mount, the Core 360 is quite unique and offers a car mounting solution with minimal bulk. There are a couple of things that you’re going to have to deal with but generally it works really well and the Power Beacon, a portable charing/battery pack is actually quite useful and would be a perfect gift for any road warrior. Both of these accessories would be perfect for any road warrior.
Based on our time with these accessories, we give them two thumbs up. We’d give them number ratings but since we don’t have a baseline for car mounts and external battery packs yet, we’re just going to stick with our thumbs up rating system.
Core 360 – Well-designed and well-built, can’t argue with that!
The Core 360 is a pretty unique car mount as it is quite minimalistic. The entire setup does require you to attach a small metal ring on the back of a case but that’s it. The base is then attached to your car with a 3M sticky. This setup has survived the several warm/cold cycles but during our test period, it’s never gotten over 10 degrees celsius or 50 degree fahrenheit so I have no idea if it will melt off in summer heat.
According to CaseCo, this mounting system can hold up to 1.3 lbs which is quite a bit. The heaviest thing we mounted was an iPhone 6 Plus at 0.37 lbs. The only bad thing about this entire system and its quite minor is the process of mounting it the device. It took us many tries but the easiest way is to have two fingers along the top and bottom of the ring so that you have an idea of where you need to seat the device. If you don’t, you’re kinda guessing where the metal plate is and that gets frustrating pretty quickly.
Now, the best part of the Core 360 is the actually 360 portion of the case. Depending on your preference, you can have your device at any orientation. You just simple turn the device to your liking or even have it at 45 degrees if you really wanted. As a warning, just because you have your smartphone right beside you, please refrain from watching anything on your device while you drive. If you want to see the car mount in action, we recommend you watch the video review.
Taking the device out is just as simple as mounting it. This entire setup is just much simpler than other car mounts where you have to clamp your iPhone down. The one thing we did wonder was how strong the magnet was during bumpier roads and the iPhone stayed on quite easily.
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Power Beacon – Lots features in this external battery pack
Now onto the Power Beacon which is a slightly different spare battery. At the beginning of the review, we said this would be a perfect gift for the road warrior as CaseCo was awesome enough to integrate a cigarrette adapter into the Power Beacon and the entire setup works quite well.
The unit itself isn’t too big has similar dimensions to the iPhone 5/5S but is about 3 times as thick. It has a 3000 mah battery which means that it will definitely fully charge your iPhone 5S but provide your iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, it will provide around 60-80% of a full charge. The exterior of the Power Beacon is covered with a soft rubber texture and unlike other battery packs that we’ve used before, when you shake it, nothing moves.
In terms of charging the unit, it will charge via a gigarette lighter but also through a Micro-USB port. We found that charging the unit through an outlet is much quicker than charging it in your car. When the Power Beacon is plugged into your car, you can still use the USB port to power your devices though the output is 1 A which will allow you to charge your iPhones or any device. Tablets are going to take a long time to charge with this setup.
Now the last thing we will mention is that CaseCo has included a flashlight with two settings which is a nice safety feature in that odd time that you’re stranded in the middle of the night.
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Have questions about our CaseCo Core 360 & Power Beacon Review Review for the iPhone 6/6 Plus? Please ask them on our Google+ page or on our Facebook page.
