(+) Hands on with the Kingston Wi-Drive

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.

Have you ever found yourself wishing you could extend the storage of your smartphone or tablet? If so, the Kingston Wi-Drive may be your solution.

This has to be one of the niftiest gadgets I ever purchased. I bought it because I thought it was a neat toy. However, I now find that I am using it almost day in and day out for a variety of reasons.

The Kingston Wi-Drive is a portable, battery-powered, wireless disk drive for your mobile devices. You can use it for all sorts of reasons with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Android devices, Kindle Fire, and more. How else will you attach a disk drive to your iPhone or iPad? The Apple and Android devices do not come with extra memory slots, so there is no method of adding extra storage space. You also cannot connect a flash drive. The Kingston Wi-Drive solves that problem by becoming an external disk drive for those and other devices.

The Wi-Drive has many possible uses. For instance, you can make thousands of MP3 music files available on your iPhone or iPod Touch, even if the present storage is full. You do that by making the Wi-Drive an external drive that connects wirelessly to that device. Is your iPad already full of movies? Add several dozen more by using the Wi-Drive as an external disk drive. Want to carry all of your digital photos with you? If you place them on the Wi-Drive, a handheld device or a Windows, Macintosh, or Linux laptop can access them easily. Likewise, you can carry thousands more books for your Kindle Fire if you add a Wi-Drive. Genealogists will appreciate that they can carry thousands of .DOC or .TXT files with research notes and information with them on a research trip and read them at any time with a handheld device.

If your handheld device is already constrained for storage space, the Wi-Drive can provide relief. Depending upon the model selected, you can add 16, 32, or 64 gigabytes of storage to any device that supports wi-fi connections.

With most handheld devices, you can't use a plug-in flash drive! Yet you can connect to the Wi-Drive through Wireless-N wi-fi networking. If you use a USB cable, you can also connect from a Windows, Macintosh, or Linux computer in the same manner as using any other disk drive or flash drive that connects via USB.

The Wi-Drive lets you store and share your favorite content with up to three  devices simultaneously. Those might be your own devices, such as an iPhone or an iPad. They also might be devices belonging to your friends. You decide. Depending upon the model you purchase, it gives you 16, 32, or 64 gigabytes of added storage for your mobile device. The Wi-Drive allows you to share photos, videos, music and more with up to three users on their own mobile devices.

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