Dubai:
Sandisk’s Wireless Media Drive is a pocket-sized and portable flash disk drive that can stream high-definition movies, photos,and music on tablets, smartphones and computers.
It comes in 32GB storage capacity and with an SDHC/SDXC memory card slot for increasing the storage capacity.
It is ideal when on holidays and where you need additional space for your smartphone or tablet.
It weighs less than 76 grams and it has a microUSB 2.0 port and with two led lights — one for power/battery status and the other for WiFi activity.
It can be connected to Android (2.2.3 or later), Windows (XP or later), Mac (OS 10.6 or later) and Apple (iOS 5 or later). When hooked up to the computer it appears like any other normal external drive and files can be manually dragged and dropped into the four folders — music, photos, videos and files.
The drive connects with the devices via an app — SanDisk Media Drive. The app is simple to install and use. The app can sort media automatically. Organising the libraries is easy as it has only four folders and no need to search the drive if you have many files, music and videos.
It creates its own WiFi network and can stream 720p videos to up to eight devices but only for five clients for HD video streaming. It work very well in the range of 10 metre radius and sometimes I got more than the allowed distance.
If the drive is plugged into a computer, it will not be accessible wirelessly.
Copying files to the device via USB cable is slow as it has a USB 2.0 port but it is faster than a WiFi.
During my tests, the device worked very well as a backup server and as mobile and tablet media streaming. The playback on smartphones depends on the devices playback capabilities, which means it doesn’t support streaming video made by devices on one platform to devices running on another. The media drive can store any file formats.
The slow transfer rates do not have an impact on the video-streaming functionality.
When viewing photos, you can shares it instantaneously via social media networks or to emails.
The app is very intuitive and lets you can change the settings and let the drive to connect to other WiFi networks (WiFi hot spot) and shows how much life is left with the battery. Password can be set for the device as well as for the WiFi network so that others don’t view your personal files.
When it comes to wireless hot spot, it is not that powerful but enough for the home or office use.
The inbuilt battery provided more than eight hours of video streaming and more than nine hours of music playback on a single device. The battery drains faster when connected to multiple devices at the same time. It is priced at Dh259
