REVIEW: Kingston MobileLite Wireless Reader

All about give and take.

If you are anything like us, you'll have your entire life in your pocket. From photos and videos, to saved documents, email attachments and important contacts, its easy to take our smartphones for granted.

But (and this is a big but) what if you lost that precious slab of silicon and glass? How many memories would you lose? It's the reason that we both love and desperately need a gadget like this, to safely and conveniently back up everything that is important to us: the Kingston MobileLite Wireless Reader.

Itself smaller than your actual phone, the MobileLite is a nifty bit of tech that connects to an external hard drive, USB flash drive or SD card then sends the data via it's own Wifi network for your phone or computer to receive. Essentially this creates a wireless media hub for streaming from and uploading to.

Setting up couldn't be easier. Simply charge the MobileLite's internal battery (yes, it has a battery meaning it will work on the go) then connect your drive or memory card. Next, download the MobileLite app from either the Android Play store or the Apple App store, and Bob's your uncle.

As we had connected a large capacity hard drive the first thing we did was back up the entire contents of our phones. This is the first and seemingly most obvious use for the MobileLite as we set the wireless upload going then forgot about it, still with the phones in our pockets. In no time at all (and without having drag and drop folders or unmount our microSD cards - as with a computer) everything was backed up and secure. It's worth the money just for that feature.

However, the MobileLite isn't just a one-way gadget as you might expect. Copied onto that drive were several TV shows we had saved - ones for which we had no room on our limited capacity smartphones. Again using the MobileLite app we could flip through folders within the drive easily and access the saved files.

USB and MicroUSB ports on one side...

Streaming was a pleasure, with very little gap between pressing play in the app's movie viewer and the episode actually starting. We watched an entire episode of Community (the one where Troy and Abed 'swap' bodies, should you be interested) without any issues at all; it was as if the file was saved on the phone rather than a hard drive in another room of the house.

The same function worked excellently while on the move as well. Carrying a film and TV show packed hard drive with us on a long train journey certainly came in handy with MobileLite as we could connect on both smartphone and tablet and stream to our heart's content. And before you ask, yes the MobileLite's internal battery is powerful enough to keep a hard disk spinning - much to our surprise and satisfaction.

...SD card port on the other.

So although there are similar products out there on the market, some of which include their own storage module (such as this one) we love the versatility of the MobileLite and it's very generous price.

Perfect for both on the move and at home, the Kingston MobileLite Wireless Reader is definitely a must--have gadget.

Next we'd like Kingston to work on a version to which we could upload our dreams. Get cracking lads.

Around £35

Visit www.kingston.com/en/usb/wireless