Kingston Wi-Drive storage device for phones and tablet computers

Users of iPhones, iPod Touch and iPad devices will be familiar with the fact that none of them accept any sort of external storage device.

With no USB socket there's been no easy way to add to the amount they hold, until now. Kingston's Wi-Drive is a small device that holds 16GB or 32GB of storage (we reviewed the 32GB edition) and connects to the iPhone or iPad wirelessly.

The Wi-Drive sets up its own wireless network, to which the device must connect. So if your iPad already connects to a wireless network you must disconnect it from that, then connect it to the one made by the Wi-Drive.

That means that the device will lose its internet connection but the Wi-Drive has a ‘pass-through' feature where it connects to that wireless network for you and passes internet traffic on to your device.

If that sounds like a bit of a faff, it is: the Wi-Drive took quite a bit of setting up. Although we were guided by some good instructions the connections were a bit flaky. It took a couple of tries before we could get both wireless networks working.

Once they were, things worked very smoothly and we were able to view files on the Wi-Drive. This has a USB connection so it can be plugged into a PC to load files onto it and charge its internal battery.

Because iPhones and iPads can't manage files, that's done using the Wi-Drive app, which is downloaded free from the App Store. This allows files to be viewed or listened to, and is also used to set up the Wi-Drive in the first place.

This is a clever solution to a big problem, but it's not a particularly elegant one: users of the Wi-Drive must spend time reconfiguring their connections and carry an extra device with them (and remember to charge it). But at the moment, it's the only real way to get extra storage for an iPhone or iPad, and it worked well.