Been seeing Facebook ads for what appears to be a wonderful new product, a flash drive that works with a lightning connection for an Apple iPad or iPhone.
Raised eyebrow at the fact that I cant seem to find this wonder device sold as a stock item in any stores so far, like the Staples, Office Depts etc etc of the world.
The Apple Store turns up nothing. I did find this review here:
. . seems like they work fairly well, and that is from 2015 so I imagine the technology has improved.
Has anyone tried one of these and how did it work? Any recommendations for lets day, under $60?
Most of all this seems like a wonderful product everyone with an iPad or iPhone should have----why aren’t they being brick-and-mortar retailed more? Do cloud apps like Dropbox make this device obsolete?
I tracked Amazon’s lightning deals in electronics recently. They listed a lot of dual USB/Lightning (!) connector thumb drives. (Just checked, none listed for today, though.)
I considered buy some as gifts to Apple-oriented family members, but they carry such a high price tag that the bang/buck was bad. Apple charges a lot for proper Lightning connector licensing. (Hence the mammoth number of cheap, dangerous, knock-offs.)
I also wasn’t sure about compatibility as some mentioned using a driver.
What problem does this solve? You can use cloud services to sync almost everything, and if you need to transfer a really large file for some reason, you can connect an iPhone to your computer over USB. This device just adds an extra step.
The cloud or your computer is also an extra step. Sometimes those steps are not available or advisable. When I’m traveling I don’t need to use my international data plan to access my files, and I don’t need my computer–which is good, since I rarely take it with. It’s also handy if my device is nearing capacity–I can easily transfer files onto it to free up space, plus I always have a microSD with tons of TV shows and movies that I can watch at any time.
Mine is branded Lexar, and was about $20.
The drawback is it’s not like popping a disk into a computer, where any program can read and write to it. Because of the sandboxed nature of iOS, you need an app to access the files. If your flash drive’s app can’t open the file you need to use (they can open most common files), you can ‘Send to’ other apps, but this means using up space on the device, and isn’t particularly quick. To transfer a large file from another app to free up space, I need to ‘Send to’ the Lexar app, which means there are two copies on my device. Then I copy to the microSD, then delete those two phone copies.
So it isn’t perfect, but it certainly beats carrying a laptop all the time, or relying on access to a server somewhere.
My dad has one with a microSD port option. The only way I was able to use it was to get a special app. Does Apple allow any apps access to the underlying filesystem?
USB flash drives “took over the world” because they allowed the common user to carry around a heap of data and program files in a small physical format and just be able to plug-and-play it into the nearest compatible system with no effort other than knowing thumbdrive 1 is the E: drive. This is not the case for iOS/Lightning flash drives:
Which for the najority of average users-on-the-street that’s a lot of steps for mere extra portable storage, something Apple has never encouraged anyway – notice no SD card slots ever on an iOS device, as opposed to Android. Besides how Apple itself makes things harder by not allowing a straight file-manager with iOS, but rather all having to happen sandboxed within an App, they seem to prefer an all-iCloud all-wireless environment for extra storage anyway.
I bought couple of these (non IOS micro sd thumbdrive) to use with my Android smartphone. Discovered (1) they do not play well with Otterbox Commuter or thicker cases as the thickness prevents the drive from fully inserting so to use I have to remove the case and (2) the latest Android OS’s do not want you moving stuff to and from an external drive via the phones file system.
They work as advertised but the snags above kind of limits the functionality. Mostly stay in drawer now.