Kingston MobileLite Wireless review

The Kingston MobileLite Wireless allows iOS and Android devices to access the contents of USB drives and SD cards wirelessly.

The battery-powered MobileLite is very light, and doesn’t feel as well built as it could be. When turned on, it creates a 2.4GHz 802.11n wireless network to which you connect your mobile device or laptop. The contents of any USB storage devices or SD cards plugged into this external hard drive can then be accessed using the Kingston MobileLite iOS or Android app or, if you’re using a laptop, as a standard SMB share.

We didn’t expect the USB port to provide enough power to attached devices, but we had no trouble accessing portable USB hard disks plugged into the MobileLite; USB flash drives and SD cards worked fine. As expected, there’s a Wi-Fi pass-through mode, the MobileLite can connect to your existing wireless network so you don’t lose access to the internet while you’re accessing files.

Both the iOS and Android apps work very similarly. In both, you can browse files in an alphabetical list or switch to dedicated tabs showing only music, photos or videos, although the music player is crude and has a very confusing interface. Both also support multitouch gestures, such as swiping to flick back and forth between photos and pinch-to-zoom. Neither version lets you upload files from your mobile device to the storage.

Sadly, the iOS app does have more limitations than the Android app. While photos can be downloaded to your camera roll, attached to emails or uploaded to Facebook and Twitter, videos can only be downloaded to the Kingston app. Files such as PDFs and MS Word documents can be opened in other apps using standard iOS menu commands.

The Android app is far more flexible. Not only can all files be downloaded anywhere you like, there’s a button to back up the entire contents of an SD card in one go. This is potentially very handy if you want to back up precious holiday photos without the aid of a PC or a laptop.

However, its file copying performance isn’t up to scratch for something so demanding. We connected a Windows 7 laptop to the MobileLite’s wireless network and ran our standard storage transfer tests. With a portable USB hard disk connected, large files were written at 3.3MB/s and read at 6MB/s.

Small files were both written and read at around 2MB/s. These slow speeds are still fast enough for streaming video and copying small batches of files, but backing up a large set of files such as an SD card full of photos will be painfully slow.

The Kingston MobileLite Wireless is very similar to the Adata Dash Drive AE400. Both have their flaws and neither is perfect, but if you absolutely must access USB storage and SD cards from your mobile device then the AE400 is better. It’s smaller and boosts battery life for longer.