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As I write this review I'm hurtling through the French countryside en-route to Disneyland Paris. At this point I've exhausted all the podcasts on my phone and am already bored of my music collection and my limited about of games. The main issue is that I only have a 16GB iPhone 6 so I'm limited to what I can take with me. I want to be entertained on this trip but am acutely aware that my family who are travelling with me will encounter the same storage issues. So before we set out I spent a lot of time looking at portable, extendable storage solutions for our iOS devices and the best I found was the Kingston 5 in 1 Mobile Companion G2.

Essentially it's a just a box with it's own WiFi network. It doesn't have any onboard storage but does come with a USB port and SD card slot which you can stuff full with your favourite media. This can then be streamed from the device via a companion app. So there's a quick overview and now we'll go in-depth.

The Hardware

Size-wise it's about the same dimensions as a 2.5" portable USB hard drive. As mentioned before there are USB and SD card slots to add your media. On the front there are three lights, one for power on, one to show WiFi activity and one for the level of charge. At the back is an Ethernet port which means that if you're in a hotel you can plug in the wired internet and share it with all of the devices connected to it. I've also found that it works well as a USB extender, this is if you have an extremely long network cable from your router. And just as a bonus plug your device into the USB port and it turns into a backup battery!

It feels well built but is a bit 'plasticy' and I've found that with it knocking around my bag and pulling it out to use it does scratch far too easily so beware.

Connection

First of all you need to download the Kingston Mobilelite app. Then with the device turned on go to your WiFi menu, find its network and connect to it. Once connected fire up the app and it will automatically detect it and any media you have plugged in via the USB and SD. You then also have admin access to the device where you can rename the SSID as well as a few other tweaks. Now here is the clever bit. Obviously you are now connected to the WiFi network of the device so what if you then want to connect to the net at the same time? Well this is sorted too. The app detects that there are other WiFi networks in your vicinity and gives you the option to connect to that too so you can surf the web and stream movies and music all at the same time. Genius!

The App

The Mobilelite app is pretty basic. All it essentially does is to show you the folder structure and files on either your USB drive or SD card and allows you to select them for streaming to your device. In terms of music MP3 is king and just works. On terms of video I had no problem streaming MP4 and MKV files (although there were a couple of exceptions which I think is something to do with their encoding) but generally it works really well. For large files there is a few a seconds of buffering but once it gets going it works really well and the quality is damn good. There is only one issue I found with the hardware as to what you can plug in to the device. I really wanted to hook up my 500GB external hard drive but this was not detected. For some reason it seems to only like thumb drives but this is a minor grievance for me.

The Conclusion

So all in all this is a great little device especially for the price. I managed to get it from Amazon for only 27 quid but this offer has now ended and it's gone up to 35 but keep an eye for upcoming offers. The streaming worked flawlessly for me and made my journey a joy especially when they were playing 'Frozen' via the coach's on-board entertainment system. If you have a low storage version of your phone/tablet then this is a must. If you want to share media with those around you then even better (up to 5 devices can connect without issue). The app is available for both iOS and Android too. I give this a huge thumbs up.

Author

Paul Wright

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