Kingston Wi-Drive MobileLite Wireless Card Reader Preview

Kingston’s Wi-Drive With A Twist

Kingston has had much success with their Wi-Drive wireless portable drives they began showcasing at CES 2011. They are a very handy way to carry a large amount of content for your tablet or smart phone without the need to spend a pretty penny for an upgrade in internal storage for said devices. Since then, a number of other companies have followed with similar products, each with their own unique design.

While at CES 2013 last month, Kingston shared with us a new but related product that they’ll be rolling and asked if we could give our feedback prior to going live with production. It puts a twist on the Wi-Drive which comes with its own built-in solid state storage, by substituting this self-contained storage with SD card slots and a USB port so the user can add their own storage – effectively making storage capacity options limitless. From this plug and play media, you can access or stream content to your iOS (5.1.1+) or Android devices.

While our beta unit is labeled Wi-Drive+ MobileLite, it looks like Kingston will just settle on just applying the MobileLite Wireless (MLW, as we’ll refer to it) appellation since it technically has no default built-in storage and therefore fits under their MobileLite line. Though similar in function, this will not be replacing but rather supplementing the existing Wi-Drive devices. As of now, we haven’t been given an MSRP but expect a much smaller price tag since it doesn’t carry any expensive NAND like the Wi-Drives. Kingston is targeting a release in Q2 2013 which is just around the corner. The lithium-polymer battery has an estimated run time around 4-5 hours which we’ve seen to be relatively accurate. This is a 25% improvement over the current Wi-Drive battery life. In addition to the ability to serve up files wirelessly, the MobileLite Wireless device can also serve as a charger for mobile devices by using the USB port to plug in a compatible charger cord. that can come in handy!

Available are one each SD and microSD slots that support up to 32GB per slot. Thus, up to 64GB of storage available simultaneously via the card slots plus virtually unlimited storage on the USB port. It supports SD, SDHC, microSD, microSDHC, plus USB 2.0 and USB 3.0. Above you can see the slots for the media cards and the source of our biggest complaint about this beta product is that there’s no indentation to allow easy access to push the cards in for insertion or to pop them out of the spring-loaded slots. Kingston is aware of this and we may see this fixed on the retail units. We should also note that media used with the MLW should be formatted as NTFS or FAT32 to be compatible.

Around the other side we see the USB port as well as the mini-USB port that can be used for charging and/or wired data transfer. The Kingston MobileLite Wireless Reader weighs in at 3.625 ounces and measures 4.93″ x 2.32″ x .68″ (L x W x H) in case you are curious how big the drive is.

While the opposite side of the above is featureless from a controls standpoint, this side houses the power button and a small hole for accessing the reset button to return the MLW device back to default settings. Along the top are three notification lights that we’ll look at on the next page.

On the bottom, outside of the product stickers, are four plastic bumps that serve as feet for the MLW device. We’d like to see something a little less slippery for feet to keep it from sliding around, especially if you are somewhere like on an airplane where horizontal surface don’t always remain that way. Again, this is a beta unit so this may be addressed on the finished product.