A USB FLASH DRIVE FOR YOUR ANDROID DEVICE
SanDisk Ultra Dual USB Drive
CONCLUSION A novel approach for easier file transfers to and from your mobile device, but only limited d to Android.
There are many ways to transfer and share files between mobile devices, most of them inelegant. Wirelessly, iOS has AirDrop and for Android, there’s always Bluetooth or NFC for newer devices. You could also use cloud storage services like Dropbox, but that generally involves first uploading the file, waiting for it to sync, and then downloading them on the target device. If you’re more old school, you could always send the file through e-mail. However, these methods are viable only if the file size is small as you’d likely incur data charges or have to find a convenient Wi-Fi spot. To transfer substantial amounts of files, you could decide to swap SD cards – unless of course your phone doesn’t support external memory. Like we said, inelegant.
For desktop and notebooks, nothing really beats having a good old USB flash drive handy and SanDisk feels there’s no reason for the smartphone and tablet generation should miss out on it, so they created the SanDisk Ultra Dual USB Drive.
The Dual USB Drive is unique because it is designed to let users quickly transfer large amounts of data between an Android device and your computer. It achieves this by having connectors at both ends of the drive. On one end, there’s a USB 2.0 connector that connects to any standard PC or Mac, and on the other, a micro USB connector that supports USB OTG (On-The-Go) specifications for plug-and-play compatibility with most Android devices. SanDisk keeps a compatibility list online, so you should refer to it before purchasing to ensure it works with your device.
If it does, then getting started is dead simple, just plug it into the micro USB port of your device and once connected, contents on the drive can be viewed using any file manager app on your device or with SanDisk’s Memory Zone app. We recommend the latter because it is more fullfeatured and intuitive, plus it neatly shows you how much space on the drive is taken up by what kind of media - photos, music or videos.
Now, SanDisk opted for USB 2.0 instead of the newer USB 3.0 standard to ensure greater compatibility for a wider range of devices. Remember, the Dual USB Drive is designed for convenient file transfers, not speed. Still, on the performance front, we found the SanDisk Ultra USB Dual Drive to be sufficiently snappy. It took about 1 minute 45 seconds to transfer a single 720p video file that is about 800MB in size from the drive to our Android test device.
All in all, the SanDisk Ultra USB Dual Drive is a nifty device that is useful if you find yourself having to transfer large amounts of data between Android devices and your computer often.