Kingston DataTraveler microDuo is a very useful and thoughtfully designed storage device, plugging into your Android device is now just as simple as using a drive on your PC, and both options fit onto one tiny USB thumb that slips into your pocket. Makes data sharing and transportation extremely easy and convenient. Let us look at this device in detail now.
Design and Features
The microDuo, like other portable computer and mobile storage solutions released recently, offers both USB and microUSB connectivity. With the microUSB connection, you’ll be able to plug the drive into most of your Android smartphones and tablets, as well as some of the new 8-inch Windows tablets, which may not offer full-size USB ports. And the USB port helps you to use the drive just like any other USB thumb drive on a PC!
A plastic cover keeps dirt and dust out of the microUSB connector, the microDuo has a hinged cover that folds up 90 degrees to expose the microUSB plug. The cover has a hinge, you have to slide the cover out before flipping it up, keeping the cover closed and the plug protected whenever it’s not in use. So the microUSB end is clean and does not put your phone connector at risk of dirt and grime!
This drive is also very small, just large enough to have a USB plug on one end and a microUSB plug on the other. It also has a small lanyard loop, so you can attach it to a keychain, which we would strongly recommend The benefit of the tiny size, is that it is much less bulky than larger drives—like the Leef Bridge—when plugged into your phone or tablet. Easy to manage and carry around, very well thought out design.
Compatibility and Software
The microDuo comes preformatted to FAT32, for plug-and-play compatibility with a wide array of products. The full-size USB connection will work with all current laptop and desktop PCs (Windows, Mac, Linux), while the microUSB connection will work with Android (4.0 and up) phones and tablets, provided they have USB OTG (On-The-Go) capability. The device list is available on the Kingston website for reference.
It also doesn’t come with any files preloaded on the drive. There aren’t any built-in encryption options, because steps that are simple on a PC—such as entering long passwords or installing encryption utilities—don’t always work well on a mobile device. Good idea!
For browsing through any files on the device, Kingston recommends using ES File Explorer on Android phones or tablets. It’s a basic file manager, but it works well. We also accessed the drive easily using other popular file managers, so your choice of apps is probably fine. Be aware, however, that many file formats commonly used on PC (such as doc, txt and rtf) do not have native support in Android. And if you want to read/edit them, you have to use apps that manage them.
Performance
Using the full-size USB 2.0 connection, we tested the DataTraveler microDuo in our timed file transfer test, copying large (1GB+) files back and forth to measure average read and write speeds. With standard USB connectivity to a PC, the DT microDuo averaged 41.5MBps (read) and 6.6MBps (write). By comparison, the Leef Bridge averaged speeds of 17.8MBps (read) and 8.6MBps (write), making it slower when accessing files on the drive, but a little faster when writing new data to the drive. But don’t expect the same performance when connected to a phone or tablet, we all know that performance varies widely from one device to the next, and is considerably slower overall. These slower speeds will be most clearly seen when transferring larger files, such as video or music files, but individual documents and photos should transfer relatively quickly.
Kingston covers the microDuo with a five-year warranty, with free technical support. This is longer than competing products, which generally come with a one-year warranty only.
Conclusion
The Kingston DataTraveler microDuo is a very simple solution to users who need to transfer files back and forth between a laptop or desktop PC and mobile device, with a convenient and thoughtful tiny design that’s easy to take anywhere. There are downsides too, it has incomplete Android support and no support for iOS products—but the smaller design and ease of use are good enough reasons to make it a very useful product. The pricing and the warranty make it good value for money. Also the cost/storage unit is relatively lower than a few other competing devices. We are impressed, but not floored by this nifty little device from the stable of Kingston.