HOW DOES IT WORK?
The MobileLite was really designed as a Wi-Fi media server, allowing you to stream data from
drives to several connected devices. It contains a small built-in battery allowing it to operate
autonomously. However the MobileLite app also allows you to view the folders on the SD card
and to dump them to the drive connected to the USB port. Best of all, you can start this process
on your phone and then wander off out of range and the process will carry on until it is
completed. Brilliant.
How do you know that the transfer is complete? If your portable hard drive has a data LED it
should stop flashing once the transfer is complete.
Once you reconnect your phone to the MobileLite’s own Wi-Fi network (which you can ‘piggy
back’ to another Wi-Fi network so you can maintain internet connection where available) you
can view images or movies on either the card or USB device and stream or copy to your phone.
FAILINGS
The first issue is that the inbuilt battery in the MobileLite is pretty small and spinning the drive
inside a portable HDD soon sucks up the juice. The good news is that you can separately power
the MobileLite (via a microUSB recharge port) while it is working, and/or you can use an HDD
cable with a split cable allowing the hard drive to be powered externally. Both together will
allow you to keep everything powered long enough for the biggest file transfer.
The second issue is a failing of the Kingston app and the slow pace of Wi-Fi connections in that
it is difficult to tell which incomplete SD card folders have been backed up. For instance within
my Canon SD card I’ll get folders called Canon_100, Canon_101 etc.
If you’ve already backed up a half-full folder to HDD then when you next connect the app you
might have Canon_101 showing in both SD and USB folders on your phone, however there may
be new data on the camera card if you’ve shot more photos. The app makes it difficult to select
only the new photos to transfer to HDD for back-up. The solution is simply to copy the whole of
the Canon_101 to the HDD again, which is easy enough to do. This overwrites the old data on
the HDD - so be careful if you've edited anything and not renamed it.
DOES IT WORK?
Yes, like a charm. I used this system in while riding a vintage scooter around Eastern Europe and
Turkey (see my Frankenstein Scooters... book) to back up both camera (SD) and helmet cam
(microSD) cards to a 1TB portable HDD. These drives are still mechanical so need to be treated
with some care, but they are reasonably rugged too.
Kingston has recently updated their device to the new Kingston G2 MobileLite Wireless Reader
(available for £25) which I have not tested but I presume will do the same trick. Alternatively the
older and smaller MobileLite for £14 is a bargain.
Review by StickyFeatures.co.uk