Wireless media drive transfer tests

Hey – having trouble getting your media from or onto or between your devices? Try a WiFi transfer drive. What are they? Well they are a couple of inches long, large, square, rectangular. They create their own WiFi network, that generally talks to an App that lives on your smart device. They are also USB in and out for connection to Desk or Laptop. They use an SD card (10 or higher is best) which can also be stuck into a card reader that’s plugged into a laptop. They generally enable streaming to a bunch of devices simultaneously. They are essential for mojo work and the missing link between iDevices and other platforms.

We tested these four some months back for our soon to be published book Mojo – The Mobile Journalism Handbook, which my mojo colleague Stephen Quinn and I have just finished.

Here’s what I found:

The Airstash by Maxell and the Connect Wireless Media Drive by SanDisk are useful transfer tools and an essential part of the mojo kit. Both use an SD card. The SanDisk has the advantage of shipping with 64GB of on-board memory and is able to run a whopping 128GB. Both devices will run for 7hrs plus and stream to multiple devices simultaneously. At the time of test the SanDisk Wireless wouldn’t talk with Camera Roll, because, SanDisk say, Apple hadn’t yet authorised the handshake, but they had with the cheaper SanDisk Flash. We are told this has now been sorted and connecting with the App enables the required Firmware update.

The cheaper option from SanDisk, the Connect Wireless Flash Drive, uses a Micro SD card and offers 4 hours of battery life. Why the Micro SD card?

The Kingston Mobile Lite Wireless drive has up to 5 hours of battery life, will enable the use of 128GB SD cards and acts as an emergency battery for mobile devices.

All devices require a free App and all transfer a variety of content and media across devices and platforms.

The above wireless connect devices can cost from $55 AUD to $250 AUD.

We have been using Airstash and the San Disk Flash for 6 months because of their camera roll handshake protocols and they rock.