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The Kingston Wi-Drive 64GB is a genuinely useful little gadget that I have used regularly for the last week. It looks fantastic and transmits a very strong signal within a 40 foot radius, more than enough for its intended purpose … which is pairing up with a smartphone or tablet.
I actually rate the Kingston Wi-Drive at a higher level than either the ADATA DashDrive or the Patriot Gauntlet which we reviewed several months ago. The Kingston Wi-Drive ships with 32GB, 64GB or 128GB of internal storage and is very thin, lightweight and easy to carry around. It charges from flat within a couple of hours, and the battery life lasts around 5 hours under normal use.
As our test results show earlier in the review, the setup is very straightforward and we didn't run into many design concerns either. The only problems I encountered were getting specific video formats to play back on the Apple iPad. I couldn't get MKV to engage, however MKV playback was flawless on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 as the application passed the decoding over to external applications.
If you have an Android tablet, this is the device you want to get. I only have around 7GB of free space left on my Galaxy Note 10.1, so adding another 64GB for media playback and PDF documents is genuinely beneficial.
Playing back a variety of MP3's, viewing JPG files and .mov files was easy enough on all the smartphones and tablets we had, although there is absolutely no support yet for Windows 8 devices, which is a little disappointing.
If you have an Android tablet, then I unreservedly recommend the Wi-Drive 64GB. It is very versatile and works flawlessly. If you have an iPad or Apple smartphone and don't need MKV playback then it is also a good choice, but I found that due to the more locked down nature of the Apple devices that successfully getting some files to play back was difficult.
The Kingston Wi-Drive 64GB is available for £75.24 inc vat. The 32GB version is only £52 inc vat. At this price it really is difficult to ignore.
Pros:
- Nice looking device and very portable due to slimline design and light weight.
- Strong transmitter.
- OSX and Windows desktop support.
- handled 720p video to 3 devices at the same time in our tests.
- 5 hour battery life before recharge.
- with third party Android player, device supported a huge variety of files.
- excellent value for money.
Cons:
- gets very warm after a couple of hours.
- shiny piano black finish can get messy quickly.
- couldn't get some video file formats to play on Apple iPad.
- Not USB 3.0.
- No Windows 8 support.
Kitguru says: A very useful device at a very competitive price point. One not to miss, especially on Android.
