Apple is famous for many things. They are famous for making the iPhone and iPad, they are famous for their never ending stream of patents for things that already exist and last but not least they are famous for making sure that you cannot use their mobile products without their approval. You see if you buy an iDevice your core file system is pretty much locked down. Now there are ways to get into the file system and move things around, but it can get messy and things do not always make the transition intact. The other side of this is that there is no way to add more storage to any of their products. It is not like an Android or Windows based tablet with an SD card slot or USB ports. So what can you do if you bought one of the 16GB non-3G iPads or if you only own the iPad touch? Kingston has an answer for you. Kingston has put their expertise in making flash drives to good use and attached a flash drive to a wireless controller that can also act as a wireless bridge. They are calling it the Wi-Drive and when you pair this up with the WiDrive app from the AppStore you might just have a relatively low cost answer to a lot of people’s needs. So follow along as we take a look at the $180 32GB Wi-Drive on a first generation iPad.
Performance - With a device like the Wi-Drive the one thing that will make or break it (beside cost) is ease of use. Well the Wi-Drive certainly has that. After I was done tinkering with it I passed this around to other people to try out. Without exception everyone was able to get connected (even multiple people) and use the Wi-Drive without a single problem. The only issue that was reported was a minor problem connecting to a 3G wireless device. This issue later turned out to be nothing more than signal strength (even though the device showed two bars there was no 3G data connection. The quality of the streaming audio and video was also very good (as long as it was the correct format). Battery Life - The battery on the Wi-Drive lasted a little over 3 hours at 80 degrees F ambient temperature. When the temp went up (we ran it our doors at 90+) the life dropped seeing around 2.5 hours at that temperature. This is not that bad in reality but could be better. The idle battery life was around 6 hours if you are not doing anything with it (not even connected).Heat Buildup -This was a concern of ours. During usage the Wi-Drive gets hot very quickly. Although if you have it in a cool ventilated place it does not seem to be an issue, if you take it out in sunlight or where the temperature is high (like camping or the beach) then it does have a slight effect on performance. The one item we noted was that when the temperatures were over 90F we had to reconnect to the Wi-Drive at random intervals. This was usually when we were moving between items (like changing from a one video to another). As such we would not recommend using this in those types of temperatures. We also want to point out that this issue could have been related to the iPad as its thermal threshold is not that great either.
