[Review] BackPack Galaxy S7 Edge casing: Juicing the pocket rocket

Performance

The weight of the casing is rather noticeable when held and adds significantly more heft and girth to the S7 Edge. Pocketing it does add a fairly obvious bulge in your pants. The battery itself is nascent until you activate it via the button up top which then wirelessly starts charging your phone. It takes a bit of time and wireless charging isn’t 100% efficient so to speak so a drained S7 Edge should be able to get about an 70% charge or so from a fully juiced up battery casing over a period of several hours. There’s still enough juice that you can make calls and text while charging though it’s best you kick in the battery at the halfway mark.

Having that large a reserve of battery power was reassuring. There’s always the need to nurse your phone’s battery power to last the day even with a heavyweight like the S7 Edge but with this battery pack tacked on, you can literally throw caution to the wind and go in full throttle.

While an S7 Edge has enough for all day battery life with heavy use, the addition of the battery pack extends it easily to two days. We used our phone from the morning onwards as a Wi-Fi hotspot for a notebook and another phone, watched videos on it, made calls, browsed the web, texted, sorted and went for a several rounds of Freeblade and Call of Duty: Heroes on it too. By the end of the day, the S7 Edge was flagging at about the 30% mark; understandable seeing the punishing drain we subjected it to but the battery pack topped it up and sorted things out easily with a steady trickle of wireless power till the phone’s own internal battery was full. And we did it again. By sundown on the commute back we still had a good 57% or so on the S7 Edge’s internal battery.

The casing itself uses Qi Inductive Charging tech to wirelessly charge your S7 Edge without the need for cables when attached though it is otherwise too thick to interact with a wireless fast charger dock. Charging the BackPack casing has to be done the old fashioned way with a microUSB cable. Assuming that the BackPack is attached to the phone and the phone is completely drained, hooking it up to the mains will charge the phone first to full capacity before it automatically tops up the battery. This process can take several hours so it’s something best done overnight.

With normal, moderate use the addition of the BackPack to your S7 Edge should easily last over two days of use. Gripping the phone when taking pictures on the camera wasn’t a major problem nor was the heft affected. In fact, the additional thickness helps somewhat in letting you have a firmer grip on the phone. Granted, it’s not cheap at RM419 but you get peace of mind as it’s officially sanctioned hardware and if you’re a traveller who is wont to make heavy use of their phone, you’ll find this will likely save your bacon when you need it the most.

What We Liked Responsive buttons, good build quality, easy to install and remove, seamlessly augments Galaxy S7 Edge battery life
What We Didn’t Doesn’t protect the front of the phone, not cheap
What We Say A pleasant looking, high performing, if somewhat weighty addition to your Galaxy S7 Edge that augments the battery life to impressive levels. It’s not cheap but this offers peace of mind when you’re a heavy user.
Price RM419
*Review unit courtesy of Samsung Malaysia
# For details on official Samsung store locations stocking the S7 Edge BackPack casing please logon to the official product site here