Performance -
Performance of a battery/ wireless storage device is more than just “how long does it let me use my phone” or “how do the movies and files look” it is also about incidentals and of course aesthetics. Incidentals are items like size, weight, convenience heat buildup and ease of use. Aesthetics are important because you do not want to drop an ugly looking device on the table next to you. So let’s talk about each of these in turn and see what we get.
Battery Life -
As mentioned above the AE400 has a 5000mAh battery inside that is used to keep the AE400 going and also to charge mobile devices. The ADATA website states that this is enough to charge two phones. In practice we found that the battery was enough to recharge our Note II from 14% to 100% about 2.5 times (the last time got us to 65%) which is a little more than twice if you think about it. Of course ADATA could be using the iPhone as the marketing standard as the AE400 only charges our iPhone 5 from 14% to 100% a little more than twice.
These tests were run without using any of the media player functions to get a good base number. In realistic usage things were a little different. We found that even watching a single movie through once (one connection) dropped things down for the Note II to a little more than a single recharge. With the iPhone we were back to a single recharge. This is still pretty good though as we were using both the internal Wi-Fi and Internet Wi-Fi connections during our testing.
In straight medai play we were able to get through 4 full movies (about 90 minutes each) before the AE400 ran out. in fact the Note II died before the AE400 did. This will change when multiple devices are connected (we saw about a 50% greater draw with 3 people connected. Your battery life will also decrease if you are connected to an internet srouce.
Heat Buildup -
The AE400 does not get warm at all we even put it inside a drawer to see if removing air flow would increase the temperature of the AE400. This is one area that the bulky design might actually be a benefit.
Aesthetics -
The DashDrive Air AE400 is a blocky and bulky device. It has a pretty cool looking surface, but for the more part it is a box with a textured top and a few ports on it. I would not call it ugly, but it is not attractive either. Then again there really is not much you can do with this type of hardware to make it pretty looking.
Ease of use -
Setting up and using the AE400 is very simple. All you really have to do is download the app turn on the AE400 and then connect it to the SSID for the device (the default is ADATA_AE400_E40). Once there you can access the device and make any changes you need. To access movies or video you will need to transfer the media to an SSD card. In our case we used a Kingston 32GB MicroSD for testing. It gave us the space we needed as well as the speed we were looking for (as far as SD cards go). To make this storage available all you have to do is insert the card before you power it on and you are good to go.
Once you have media on the card the Air Elite App will automatically put them in the “folders” inside the app so that it is easier for you to find what you are looking for. There really is not much that you can do to screw things up when you are trying to get the DashDrive Air AE400 working. One really nice thing about the DashDrive Air AE400 is that it is not just for smartphones and tablets running the Elite App. You can connect any device to it and use it as a bridge. If you are using a PC or Mac you can browse to the AE400 using the IP address (the default gateway address when you run IPConfig) to access the media that is stored on it. We used it to watch a couple of movies and also to edit this review (which was stored on the AE400). There were no issues in doing both at the same time.
