New toy - Sandisk Wireless Flash Drive

I got a new toy the other week - a Sandisk Wireless Flash Drive. This was not normally something I would have bought, but it showed up as a Kindle-exclusive special offer on my new Kindle Fire HDX (post on that coming later) - the 32GB model was only $20, which is about 66% off the normal retail price. I didn't really know anything about the device or how it worked, but for only $20, I figured, why not?

Sandisk Wireless Flash Drive(Photo by Pierre Lecourt, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0.)

It turns out that this is an interesting little "flash drive". First, to be clear, it's not really what I would normally consider a "flash drive". For starters, it doesn't actually have any built-in storage - it has a MicroSD slot with a 32GB card in it. So the "flash drive" itself is more like a MicroSD card reader that's also a networking appliance.

The networking portion is actually kind of cool. In it's most basic configuration, the Wireless Flash Drive acts as a WiFi access point. You associate to it and it supplies you an IP and can serve out content. However, it also allows you to configure it to associate to an internet-connected access point. So you can tell it the SSID and WPA credentials of your network and anything on the LAN will be able to access it.

The device is built to work with a mobile app (available for both iOS and Android) which allows you to not only access the data on it, but also configure it. However, while the app is actually not bad, it turns out you don't need it. The device provides a web interface that lets you configure it as well as browse content. And on further research, it turns out that the Wireless Flash Drive serves it's content out over WebDAV! So forget the mobile app - you can actually access it from any PC with a WebDAV client.

Though I haven't had opportunity to use it heavily yet, I have to say the Wireless Flash Drive is actually a pretty cool little deice. I probably wouldn't pay $60 for it, simply because I don't need it that much. But if you happen to have a distinct use for such a device, it's pretty cool and more open to tinkering than I'd expected.

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