Hands-on with Kingston's Wi-Drive wireless iPhone storage device

Computex Taipei 2011 - We managed to meet up with the folks from Kingston at a lovely Taipei tea house and there we got introduced to their full range of current and upcoming products.



One that got our attention was the Wi-Drive. This is a phone looking device and at the right time you may even confuse it for an iPhone 3G without the screen. It will go on sale probably around the September timeframe and start off at 16GB of storage. It is estimated to have a retail price of around $120, but Kingston suggested you might see it around the $99 mark. We hope it does hit this price or lower, as it is rather costly for only 16GB of storage.



So, a little more about the Wi-Drive. We saw a prototype version earlier this year at CES, but the latest version we saw this week at Computex looks to be more mature and almost complete from what we could see. The Wi-Drive offers wireless additional storage for your iPhone. You will need to download the Wi-Drive app that connects the device to your iPhone over wireless. Within the app you will be able to access and view the data that you copied to the device from your desktop or laptop.



One thing that we aren't too happy about is that the Wi-Drive is read only from the iPhone itself. That means you cannot copy data from the iPhone to the Wi-Drive and that is a bit of a bummer. The device though should still become popular and sell well under the popular Kingston brand for all of those iPhone users out there who are looking at expanding the storage capacity of their iPhone.