Kingston MobileLite Wireless
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,389 words · ~6 min read
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forair Raptor K40 keyboard and M45 Mouse
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are designed to provide best in-class features and performance for gaming
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click now to learn more the Kingston mobilite Wireless is a multi-purpose
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device it's a wireless video streamer so it's designed to stream to Portable
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devices like phones and tablets it is a wireless card reader so it has an SD
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card reader as well as a wireless USB reader for aention mobile devices and
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finally it is a backup battery although I really feel the first two are the ones
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where it really shows its strength whereas that third one is not a strong
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point for it it has an 1850 mAh battery
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for both itself for its own functionality and to charge an attached
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device so it's more like something you'd use an emergency as opposed to something
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where you'd have your phone Tethered to it while you wirelessly stream something
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to yourself and expect to sit and watch movies like that overall the device is a
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little bit on the larger side than I would have liked and it but still feels
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quite light and whether that to you is more like like an oh it feels kind of
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cheap or whether you prefer to have things be lightweight I I like it when
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things have a little bit of heft to them but the good news is that my initial
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impression of oh it feels kind of light and and expensive uh was correct it is
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relatively inexpensive for 50 bucks Kingston is giving you a platform with
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which to use your own storage in order to stream things wirelessly as opposed
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to most of the devices like this on the market that include storage and are
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therefore much more expensive so you can just use existing USB drive and SD cards
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that you have lying around which is definitely a plus also my experience
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continued to be positive once I fired up the app download so you can see I've got
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it running on a variety of platforms here everything from an iOS tablet down
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to a couple of Android smartphones and the ratings of the app in addition to my
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experience seem to uh reinforce that overall it's pretty darn good it doesn't
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have a lot of functionality and many of the mediocre ratings for the app are
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less to do with it didn't work it sucks and more to do with here's some great
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stuff Kingston could add in order to make it better which I think is is
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actually a very positive indicator of the direction that they're going with it
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stability first and then trying to add more features a lot of these Wireless
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streamers just flat out don't work very
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well the easy setup guide within the app is a little bit verbose it's a little
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bit text Heavy not as visual as I'd like but it covers all the basic stuff like
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connecting to the mobile light Wireless through Wi-Fi how to secure the
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connection and then how to set up internet p through so the all three of
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these devices have internet connections and they're streaming 1080p media from
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this thing at the same time the app could definitely be prettier
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particularly on the Android side but the functionality is Rock Solid and I didn't
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have to waste any time fighting with it to get it to work so I I think this is
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actually the first time that I've seen an app that really feels more mature and
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more solid on Android than it does on iOS and a kudos to Kingston for spending
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the time on the dominant plat what is now the dominant platform to make it
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actually work correctly so often I see the iOS app is awesome and the Android
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one is kind of like frankensteined together and even seeing both of them at
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parody is uh not as common as I'd like but in this case I really felt the
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Android one was quite strong even though the iOS one did look a little bit better
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I mean to be clear guys the iOS app is fine it's functional but it doesn't have
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the same uh the same number of features
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and part of this is is just iOS's fault in the first place so for example the uh
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ability to directly copy files back and forth wherever you need within the
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directory structure on the device is something that the Android app can do
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but the iOS 1 can't um something that I wouldn't mind seeing added to the iOS
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one is the ability to use a third-party player um so on the Android one I can
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use just the included player I can use BS Player I can use whatever I want so
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that I get great file compatibility whereas on the iOS one it basically just
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isn't even detecting the immedia file types that it's that it doesn't support
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so that was that was a bit of an issue for me with the iOS one um I did test
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with up to three devices streaming 1080p but these are uh reasonably low bit rate
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files like they're not like crazy uncompressed or anything like that and
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there were no issues at a range that I'd consider to be reasonable so anywhere
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within sort of 10 or 15 ft typically this is something I'd use for traveling
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in the car on a plane or something like that so you wouldn't be tremendously far
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away from it um one cool thing is that it does allow both the USB uh port and
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the SD card slot to be used at the same time so you can pack some serious
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storage punch if you want to all you do is use the app to select which one
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you're interested in browsing and you can browse the local storage on the device or built within the app on the
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iOS version as well Kingston does have a
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1 tbte USB drive and then you could throw up to a 256 G SD card in there for
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a massive amount of storage in fact I've even seen people using them with USB
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hard drives if you have a um a pigtailed
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connector and then you use another USB connector for power and plug into a
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portable battery bank or something like that so there's a ton of flexibility
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here and I think overall my takeaway from this review is that it's great to
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see how much these devices have matured since the early attempts like the
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expensive and unsuccessful wi Drive um they still don't really make any sense
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at home since there are much better Solutions like air video and emit for
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streaming when you have anytime you have a data connection like from your home PC
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across Wi-Fi or even on someone else's Wi-Fi but for traveling particular on
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planes these things are a godsend the
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mobile light definitely gets a green light from me at under 50 bucks and I
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think it is a very very smart buy I
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guess I didn't really talk about it physically much so it's um got a USB
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charging port to charge the internal battery a USB port for the uh USB you
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know drive and then it has an SD card slot and I guess there's not really a whole lot to say power button so you
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hold that to turn it on thank you for checking out my overview and review
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whatever you want to call it of the mobile light w less from Kingston don't
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