[Samsung Galaxy Note 8 Accessories] rayraynz:
I have always wanted an external case that is also a wallet.

Unfortunately these are only avaliable for older iphones.

About a year ago, I emailed IBlades to make a wallet+battery case for the Note 6 and they finally delivered for the Note 8

The case comes as two parts

1) A standard wallet case with an air quality sensor

2) A magnetic battery+storage+sd card reader+memory attachment

Most of that I dont need - I just want the wallet and battery.

The Wallet itself

It stores 3 cards, and has a slot for larger paper notes. This is very adequate.

There is no windowed card slot for a drivers license or ID card.

It is missing a magnetic strap to keep it closed though. This means as the phone falls to the ground, the wallet cover opens up and exposes the screen.

There is a very very tight and almost painful hole which you must poke your finger in to access the stylus - unless you have long finger nails its pretty difficult to get the stylus out.

Leather/Pleather build quality is very nice

The smart case

There is an app you must download and its very buggy.

The case itself seems to use a lot of power and there is a very tiny standby switch which must have been an afterthought as its very small and in a bad location.

The case has two modes

Mounted and Standby

Changing modes causes the phone to display a hundered messages "dismounted media" and often the app / case cant detect the presence of a blade.

There is an air quality sensor - this seems to be a bit of a waste of space as I can only see a market for these in Asia.

Aside from that it seems to use a lot of power to run that single feature.

There does seem to be a auto charge function - this is my top feature wish for this product. You set a low and high value and when your phone battery drains to that low value, the unit automatically starts charging, and stops again at the high point. This means you can keep your internal phone battery at a healthy and life prolonging 70-90%

Unfortunatley when the case is in standby mode, the automatic charging wont start. When the case is in mounted mode, it can recognise the battery is low and needs to start charging but it does prompt you - it wont just start charging.

The problem is if you keep the case mounted, you use more of your internal phone battery.

USB Mode

Often I find when the case starts charging the phone, the power is flowing in the reverse direction - the phone says its powering the external usb device, not charging from it. Attempts to change the mode using the samsung swype down menu causes the device to display a hundred dismount device messages and crashes the app.

The Blade

This has been disappointing - when competitors are advertising 5500mah or 10000mah battery sizes, this only has a 2500mah capacity. These really must have been designed for iphones because no samsung user needs external memory so it would be good if a larger capacity battery was avaliable that didnt waste space with an external sd card reader and storage memory inside every blade. I cant understand why you would want to loose access to all your files when you just want to swap batteries. The samsung has a built in sd card reader so there is no need to use the sd card reader in the blade.

The app however that is used to transfer files to the attached blade appears to be easy and simple for typical users.

The blade itself often cant be detected by the case and it requires powering down, dismounting, remounting the case to the phone, physically and using the switch, as well as attaching and removing the blade to make it work.

Edit - If the app is not showing there is a blade connected, you can turn off the phone and pull off the blade. The phone screen will come back on as it detects the hardware change, but the app still wont show a blade when you reattach it.

Quirks

- If you plug your usb charging cable into the case, it will fast charge, but if you plug into the usb port on the battery it will only slow charge the phone. This is perfectly acceptable as it charges both the blade battery and internal battery at the same time.

It does sound like many of these issues can be fixed by offering a larger size blade/battery-only and firmware updates.