ADATA AI910 Lightning Card Reader Plus Review

TweakTown's Rating: 87%

The Bottom Line

With its current MSRP, the ADATA AI910 is a solid value for those needing an all-in one card reader with SD and microSD support.

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ADATA has been hard at work revamping and adding to its portfolio of portable solution. One area that has seen a boom as of late is the Lightning connection. We have seen many vendors launch iOS card readers, but ADATA has set out to not only create an iOS solution but rather make their product compatible with Windows and Android as well.

The AI910 is the latest submission from ADATA. This solution at its heart is an Apple and MFi certified card reader solution, but ADATA has taken this further by adding in micro-USB for Android and Windows compatibility. On the input side, this solution supports both SD and micro SD solutions up to 256GB.

Compatibility includes iOS 8+, Windows 7 and Android, and the MSRP of the ADATA Lightning Reader Plus comes in at $39.99 with a two-year warranty.

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Packaging for the AI910 carries an image of the device on the front with mention of the iOS, Android, and Windows compatibility.

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The scope of delivery includes the card reader, manual and USB cable.

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Looking at the card reader the front houses both the microSD and SD ports. The main cable coming out of the card reader is the Lightning cable with the side offering a micro USB connection.

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Here you can see the micro USB connection.

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The app used with the AI910 is iMemory from ADATA.

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Diving into the app, we can see the storage capacity of the inserted SD card. Below we have a file manager with options for photos, music, and video.

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There is an option to do file transfers from your device to the SD or micro SD card.

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The settings for the app allow you to configure the name, clear the cache, and even start a contact backup.

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Testing the performance over Windows, I used a SanDisk Extreme UHS-II 32GB SD memory card. As you can see, the card reader is limited to USB 2.0 speeds over the micro USB connection as well as the Lightning connection.

The ADATA AI910 is one of the only devices I have seen on the market to combine cross platform functionality in a card reader. In most cases, you will find an iOS solution as a standalone device, so it's certainly more consumer friendly for ADATA to combine Lightning with Micro USB. Build quality is good with this solution and at its current MSRP makes for a pretty solid deal for what you are getting.

Performance is poor by today's standards, but for those just moving photos around, the sequential speed isn't so much of an issue as it would be for 4K video. In my testing, I reached a peak read speed of 42 MB/s and write speed of 40 MB/s, both limited by the USB 2.0 interface.

The app for this solution is put together quite well and is very straightforward and easy to use. Both your external and internal storage have file managers that split your data into categories and clicking on any of these categories and the file inside will allow you to transfer them to the other storage medium. The app also allows for contact backup which for iPhone isn't so much of a feature with iCloud already taking care of this, but it does add to the package as a whole, especially for those that don't use the cloud.

Tyler's Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: ASUS Maximus IX Hero (buy from Amazon)
• CPU: Intel Core i7 7700K (buy from Amazon) / (Read our Review)
• Memory: G.SKILL TridentZ DDR4 3200 (buy from Amazon)
• Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Hybrid (buy from Amazon)
• OS Storage: Intel 730 480GB SSD (buy from Amazon) / (Read our Review)
• Secondary Storage: MyDigitalSSD BP5 512GB SSD (buy from Amazon)
• Case: EVGA DG-86 (buy from Amazon)
• Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA 750 P2 (buy from Amazon)
• Networking: ASUS PCE-AC88 AC3100 (buy from Amazon)
• Networking: ASUS ROG 10G Express
• Networking: ASUS Thunderbolt EX3 (buy from Amazon)
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 (buy from Amazon)