Did this iPhone take a hard knock, or did it get knocked up?
Social media was abuzz Tuesday about the very noticeable “bump” on the back of Apple’s new iPhone charging case, whose design struck some critics as painfully inelegant by the company’s standards.
“This case has a badunkabump,” quipped tech reviewer Lauren Goode on the Verge, referring to the jarringly irregular shape created by the plump battery being housed in the case’s middle.
“It’s a my-iPhone-ate-my-iPod bump,” she continued. “It looks like you tried to shove a few too many credit cards and ID cards into the back of your iPhone case.”
Reviewers like Engadget’s Chris Velazco couldn’t help noting the irony of a “lumpy” accessory coming from Apple, which always has “seemed more eager to build thinner phones than improve the battery life.”
On the positive side, the new $99 case released Tuesday does a pretty good job of extending the charge of an iPhone 6 or 6s. But in tests, it fell short of its 25-hour claim, as well as the performance of several other cases.
“There are plenty of cheaper, more capacious options, and some of those are prettier, too,” Velazco wrote.
Still, he and others noted that the Apple case has the unique advantage of being monitored by the iPhone’s own iOS operating system.
In addition to using the home screen to check battery usage, the case uses up its own charge before the iPhone’s.