Kingston MobileLite Wireless Review

Kingston MobileLite Wireless Review: Handy, But Far From Perfect
Jamshed Avari, 4 August 2014

All iOS devices (and a few Android ones as well) have limited storage capacities and there's nothing a user can do about it once the device has been bought. Apple charges a ridiculous amount for higher-capacity variants of its products, and sometimes even the largest size isn't enough. You could use cloud services and rack up massive 3G bills, or fiddle around with inelegant accessories or USB OTG dongles.

Kingston's MobileLite Wireless uses the universal Wi-Fi standard to add storage space (and versatility) to your Android and iOS devices. The MobileLite acts as a Wi-Fi access point, and if you connect your device to it, you can use the free companion app to browse the contents of an attached USB drive or SD card.

This seems like a simple and effective solution in theory, but let's see how well it works in the real world.

Look and feel
The Kingston MobileLite Wireless is a rectangular brick that's around the size of a laptop charger, though much lighter. Its two-toned grey plastic body is simple and unassuming - you probably wouldn't guess what this thing does at first glance. There's a full-sized SD card slot on one end, while the other has a USB port and a Micro-USB port. There's also a small power button on one side, with three status LEDs above it.

The MobileLite doesn't have any built-in storage, but it does have an 1,800mAh battery which can be used to charge other devices via USB. Its primary purpose is to act as a Wi-Fi access point so that you can access the contents of an SD card or USB pen drive from your phone or tablet.

There's a green power indicator, and two more for Wi-Fi. One tells you whether the MobileLite itself is broadcasting, and the other tells you whether its pass-through function is active

Kingston includes a USB cable and a microSD-to-SD adapter. We would have liked an actual SD card to be included with the package - how much would that have cost the company?

Setup and usage
There really isn't much to setting up the MobileLite - all you have to do is press the power button for one second to begin charging a device over USB, or three seconds to turn on the Wi-Fi features. We loaded a 4GB SD card and a 16GB USB drive full of assorted files and plugged them both in. Both our test devices, an iPhone 5c and a fourth-generation iPad, were able to detect and connect to the MobileLite's Wi-Fi broadcast without any trouble - there's no security by default.

We had downloaded the Kingston MobileLite app in advance on both devices. The app is clean and simple. It displays the contents of the two storage devices, plus a section labelled Offline Files which shows files that you've copied over to your device's local storage. We could browse through files by folder, or filter by photos, videos or songs across USB and SD media.

In terms of the interface, you can shuffle and repeat audio tracks but you can't create playlists, which would have been very nice. Music can play in the background in iOS, and lockscreen integration also works perfectly.

The Copy from Photos option lets you select photos in your Camera Roll and other albums and then copy them to either media, which is a handy way to back up photos or access them quickly from other devices. You can also rearrange files on your media, delete them, and sort them into folders.

We used the iPhone first, but interestingly, when we fired up the same app on the iPad, it took us through an initial setup wizard which prompted us to change the MobileLite's SSID (Wi-Fi name), create a password, and set up the Wi-Fi pass-through.

Since most portable devices can only connect to one Wi-Fi access point at a time, you have to connect to the MobileLite instead of your usual Wi-Fi router or access point. Ordinarily this would mean losing Internet and home network connectivity, which would be highly inconvenient. Kingston circumvents this by using the MobileLite as a relay for your Wi-Fi connection and passing it through to your portable devices.