If you’ve got an ultrabook, a tablet, and a smartphone, you know how troublesome it is to transfer files from one device to another. Using a hard drive or a thumb drive is tedious, and you might not have an OTG thumb drive that can be inserted to your mobile devices. Using a wire is also nothing but troublesome. Hence, Asus has came up with a wireless solution for you. The Asus Travelair AC is a 32GB wireless storage device that seeks to solve all your multimedia woes, but how does it fare?
How Do You Use It?
Charge up the device for 8 hours first, then install the ASUS AiDrive app on the gadgets you’re using. If they run Android, iOS, or Kindle Fire OS, then it will work just fine.
Connection to the hard drive can be established using Wi-Fi transmissions, which most users will use to move items cross-platform, but SAMBA and UPnP connections are available as well if you want to stream media onto televisions as well.
Why Do You Need It?
To provide more storage space for devices with limited memory. For instance, smartphones such as your iPhone still refuse to allow for you to expand your on-board memory with a microSD card, so having a wireless hard drive around ready to stream the next episode of Narcos to your iPhone is probably going to be pretty useful. It’s not as powerful as something like Google Drive, which can be accessed universally, but if you’re running on limited data or internet, then these streaming facilities will be useful, not to mention, much faster (if you’re downloading a 500MB file).
Apart from dealing with on-board memory issues, it also serves well as a multimedia storage device for cross-platform use. So your laptop, smartphone, and tablet can access the same word document whenever you need it too.
How Does it Fare?
In terms of portability and battery life? Great. The device is small and light so carrying it around is effortless. It’s so small you can even fit it in your pocket. The battery life of up to 10 hours is also fairly remarkable for a device so light.
It’s pretty fast for a wireless hard drive too. I managed to transfer a 500MB video within 2 minutes, which we all know is hard to hit for wireless transfers.
However, connecting to the Asus Travelair AC isn’t too intuitive on PC since it doesn’t show up as a thumb drive or hard drive in your My Computer section. Accessing it on mobile via the app was much easier. I would stick to wired transfers on PC to make things easier, but that may defeat the purpose of buying the Travelair AC.
The issue with mobile though, is if you have Wi-Fi connection in the area, whenever you try to connect to your Travelair AC, the mobile device might automatically try to reconnect back to the original Wi-Fi connection because the Travelair AC’s Wi-Fi bands do not have internet connection, and your phone recognises it as a poor Wi-Fi choice. This may interrupt file transfers and get rather annoying.
Conclusion
Nevertheless, the TravelAir AC is a decent wireless storage option, but I believe it’s best suited for users on the go who have tablets or smartphones that do not allow for expandable storage mainly. This device retails at $99, which is neither dirt-cheap nor expensive, so if you need a wireless storage option, do consider it.
