Leef Bridge 3.0 dual USB drive review

The Leef Bridge 3.0 is a compact USB flash drive with both a microUSB connector and a full-size USB3 connector. It’s designed for smartphone and tablet users who don’t have enough room on their phones’ internal storage but who still want to watch movies or TV on the move.

It’ll only work with phones that support USB on-the-go (OTG), meaning iPhone users are out of luck. Most modern Android handsets support USB OTG natively, while others require you to download an app. There’s no real consistency to which phones work and which don’t, and not all phones’ manuals or websites will tell you if the protocol is supported. If you’re running Android and you know your phone doesn’t support USB OTG you might be able to use a third-party application such as ES File Explorer or Nexus Media Importer. To check whether your device supports the Leef natively, look at this page on the Leef website.

The Bridge 3.0 Dual USB is a tiny device – just 37mm long when closed and 20mm wide. In its own right, therefore, it’s a handily compact little USB drive.

While outright performance isn’t hugely important here, it’s worth noting that  speeds from the USB3 end are curiously slow, particularly the write speeds. Small write and read speeds were 18.4MB/s and 2.6MB/s respectively, while large files were written at 12MB/s and read at 88MB/s. It’s very strange to see such a gulf in performance between read and write speeds.

Speeds into your mobile device will vary and – this is important – extremely high quality videos will struggle to play on certain devices. If you’re going to be watching videos directly from your Leef, make sure they’re in a format that doesn’t require a fast transfer speed. We’d recommend 720p or lower just to be sure.

There are much cheaper similar devices available on the market, though, and £25 for 16GB of storage is rather steep. However, the Leef’s saving grace is that there aren’t many dual USB drives this small and even fewer that have USB3 support. 

Overall, the Leef Bridge 3.0 is an extremely handy USB drive for low-capacity smartphones and tablets. While performance isn’t stellar and write speeds are curiously slow, its compact size is enough to make it a useful buy for owners of smartphones and tablets with only a small amount of storage.