Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Kind of a first impressions here since I just got it delivered a half hour ago. I tried it on and right away the jacket fit me fine but it felt like a couple sizes too small. I ordered a 2X actually thinking it might be too big but it feels like a medium when I put it on at the same time actually fitting me fine. Now I've read that in order for the heat to work for your body it has to be somewhat tight to you so I'm going to figure that the way they are sizing things works for that reason alone. Maybe it fits fine for everyone but feels tight for a reason? Now with that out of the way I hooked it up and plugged it in to make sure it works before I put the battery on the charger. The button to turn it on is on the outside of the jacket right on your left breast side. You hold it down for a couple seconds and the button pulses on and off with a nice, and very noticeable red glow. I can already tell I'll be asked about it alot. Once it stops pulsing the jacket is preheated and the button just stays a steady red. You can change the heat settings at this point and the button changes color to show you what it's at. Red is high, white is medium, blue is low. All of which has a very noticeable glow. Contrary to what the site said there isn't a USB charging port in the front. The ports are located on the battery pack itself. There's a standard USB on one side of it and a mini USB on the other. The jacket has a single prong power connector that you plug the battery into and then the battery gets put into a hidden pocket with a zipper inside, almost directly behind the front left pocket. The battery felt pretty heavy when I was assembling but once I put the jacket on it wasn't even noticeable. The battery itself also has a power button with a row of leds to show what the charge is at. I'm hoping you can charge the pack with a USB cable like from a phone but I'll find out tomorrow when I take it to work. I'm impressed with it so far and I'll be updating this as I go throughout this year's winter. I work outside no matter what the weather is. I'm hoping this thing will make my job a little better. Update: First day out today and it stayed around 34 degrees and rained all day long along with being very windy. The first hour or so outside I didn't even turn it on. I wanted to see how well it held up being a normal jacket and it held its own very well. It kept the heat in and broke the wind. The hood part was actually comparable to how warm a beanie would be just using it alone. Once it gets colder I'll probably use it with a winter hat. After the first hour it started to rain harder and I was hoping i wouldn't have to use my rain coat so I tried to see how well it held up to water, it does and it doesn't. The fabric seems to be water resistant at first, small drops would bead up on the jacket then roll off, but once it rained more and harder the drops would pool up on the fabric and then eventually soak into it. I didn't actually feel wet myself. I couldn't really tell if it's the type of material that was supposed to look and feel wet for it to actually repell water, like alot of camping rain gear nowadays, but the thing that made me change my mind about it was I had the heat on standing out there being bombarded by rain for about 40 min and like I said I didn't actually get wet but the cold from the water was actually negating the heating element on my back to where I actually thought I shorted the element out and it stopped working. This wasn't the case once I got out of the weather and noticed how drenched the back of the jacket was. So yeah it's not a replacement for your rain coat, was hoping it was myself but it's not a big deal for me. You definitely don't get wet but you will feel cold from the water. The plus side to this material in that respect is that it drys off very quick. Like within 5 or 10 min it was bone dry again. As to the amount of cold and rain and wind I dealt with today the jacket made me feel normal so I can do my job without being annoyed with the weather. I can't judge the battery life just yet because I would turn it on when I was outside but off again once I knew I'd be inside for awhile. Update: First week with the jacket and I got a good idea on how long the battery will last. Theres 6 little lights ontop of the battery that represents how charged it is. I've figured out that on the white setting for the thermostat each light represents about an hour being on. So about 6 or 7 total hours on that setting total if you turn it on and off each hour you use it. You'd probably get more time out of it if you didn't turn it on and off all day because no matter the temperature of the heating elements the thermostat always does a 5 minute preheat every time you turn it on. Which actually gets alot hotter on that setting than even high does. So it's tough to tell how much battery power the preheat uses. Right now with work being kind of slow I'm not working to the full days hours so the jacket has lasted me all day. I'm guessing if you work a standard 8 hours every day it might last you but I could work anywhere between a few hours up to 14 so I'm pretty certain that once it picks up again I will most certainly want to buy an extra battery pack to keep me warm all day. I did try charging the pack with a car charger and it does charge via the mini USB port just like a cell phone. A half hour or so gave me one light worth of charge, but I'm going to highly, highly recommend against charging this battery this way because in that half hour the battery got incredibly hot, hotter than I'm comfortable with considering that when it's charging on its own plug at home it doesn't even warm up. Plus the manual explicitly says do NOT use anything else other than the charger that came with the coat. The only place you can get an extra battery pack seems to be ororos website. $50 for the same pack and charger the jacket came with. Which I guess isn't an awful price considering its very specific to the jacket. Plus the battery is actually very good at charging other things. Yesterday it was warm enough to not even use the jacket so I charged my phone with the battery and it had my Z2 fully charged from 15% to 100% in about 45 min to an hour and it used alot less power to do it than heating the coat does so I'm confident that if in a pinch I had to charge something in my pocket while the coat was on I would be able to without fear of absolutely killing the battery. The only thing keeping me from giving it 5 stars at this point is longevity and durability. I have lots of rough and dirty things I move around all day long and after a week the jacket is alittle dirty but it doesn't appear to be fraying or getting scuffed up anywhere. I'm hoping the material will last years but I think after a month or so I'll have a better idea of how durable it is.