Kingston Wi-Drive

Kingston Wi-Drive

RRP incl GST: $200 (16GB), $265 (32GB)
Contact: kingston.com

AT A GLANCE

• Handy for audio and video storage, but fiddly to use
• Not deeply integrated with iOS
• Only 16 or 32GB sizes available

Expanded hard drive space for your iOS device is a nice idea, but it falls down in the practicalities.

Before you can run the Wi-Drive, you need to charge it. This is handled via USB cable – a mini-USB connection on the drive, and a regular USB port on your laptop, desktop, or standard AC/USB charger. The charger indicator light – which doubles as the on/off switch – is supposed to stay green once charged, but it continues to flash, making it hard to tell if the device’s battery is at maximum capacity.

That would be okay, except while you’re charging the device, you can’t switch on its wireless features. Given that it can be hard to tell how much battery life the drive has left, it would be nice if you could both power it and use it simultaneously. I’m honestly not sure why you can’t. It took me a few attempts to start it while plugged in, followed by some attempts at charging it while it was on, to figure out what was going on.

On my Mac, it appears as two drives – CD-ROM and Kingston – but only one shows up in the Finder, making ejecting the drive safely a matter of heading to the desktop and clicking the other drive before ejecting to ensure you don’t corrupt the data.

Setting it up on the iPad was similarly unintuitive. You need to install a Wi-Drive app from the App store, and then follow a convoluted sequence. First switch the Wi-Drive on, and wait until its wireless function is active (indicated by a tiny pair of blue lights that can be hard to see on the shiny glare-prone surface). Once it’s up and running, you head to your iPad settings, and under the Wi-Fi options, add the Wi-Drive as your connection. Then start the Wi-Drive app. If any of these are done out of sequence, you get no results.

Once you’ve launched the App, you can access files on the Wi-Drive. The interface has a nice set of simple buttons to let you scan photos, video and music easily, or you can just scan a list of files from the home folder. A settings button lets you connect via the Wi-Drive to another wireless network – handy if you want internet access while you use the drive. There are also options to set up the Wi-Drive’s security and drive name.

I tried playing back video, audio and images from the Wi-Drive. An iTunes-store purchased video and AVI files failed to play: video formats seem limited. Music worked much better – I could play tracks back either through the quick-play feature of iOS4 or through the Wi-Drive interface. Quality of streaming was excellent. Photos were similarly simple, but don’t appear in the Photos app on the iPad.

This lack of integration is the biggest issue, particularly when integration is the hallmark of the iOS experience. Despite being able to copy other types of files onto the Wi-Drive, for example, there doesn’t appear to be any way to interact with them. You can’t drag and drop files into the Wi-Drive from the iPad or vice versa, and although multiple users can connect, they all get access only to the files already installed. There’s no AirDrop compatibility.

The battery lasts around 4 hours according to Kingston. That’s long enough for a movie, or for several TV episodes.

I really wanted to like this drive, but it seems unnecessarily fiddly, and for only 16GB of space, I think I’d rather go without.