During a visit to any mall (or really, anywhere outside) can be met with numerous people happily clutching their phones or tablets, taking pictures of their surroundings or themselves; but what happens when you need to transfer the photos off the device? Well, you can email them to yourself, on the iPhone you can only do that 5 at a time, so if you have more than 5 photos, it’ll take you awhile, or you can just use the SanDisk iXpand. We got our hands on a device to play around with it, and here’s what we thought of it.
Design
Measuring at just under 65mm x 36.78 mm x 11.8 mm and weighing at just over 30 grams, the iXpand is certainly portable enough to easily fit in your pocket. It’s made from aluminium casing and rubber, topped with a plastic cap. No other bells and whistles are required here.
The iXpand is thin enough to be easily connected to the iPhone in a case, something that’s a great advantage, as at times it can be an annoyance to have to remove the case just so you can get a device to work with the iPhone.
Performance
The iXpand works with any devices with a lightning connector, so basically iPhone 5, 5C, 5S, 6, 6 Plus, iPad Air, iPad Mini, etc. Using the iXpand you can watch movies and listen to music directly from the device, so it does more than transfer your photos, it’s also your portable entertainment centre without having to deal with transferring files onto your phone directly. There’s support for .mwv, .avi, .mkv, .mp4, and .mov formats so you’re all set, no matter what your video format preferences are. We’ve tested the device with several files, and aside it draining the iPhone’s battery, you can easily watch an episode of a series or a movie whenever possible without any issues, just be sure to have a battery pack or a power outlet nearby so you don’t get caught with a dead battery.
The iXpand’s battery lasts for a long while, it would be nice if it could charge the iPhone though. That said, you can pretty much forget about the iXpand itself running out of juice as whenever the device is plugged into a USB port, it’ll charge by itself. You can also charge it via an A/C adaptor with a USB cable, but that’ll rarely be necessary. Charging doesn’t take a long time, but it’s usually best to leave it charging overnight so it’s fully ready to go by the time you’ve had your morning cup of coffee and are ready to tackle the day.
Once the iXpand is connected to the iDevice, an alert will appear prompting the user to install the Sync app if it’s not installed yet, if it is, then the user will be prompted to open the app. The rest is easy. Much like the iXpand’s physical design, the app is also designed without any unnecessary clutter. A nice offering from the app is the ability to easily see how much space there’s on the device itself as well as on the iPhone, so you can keep track of that easily.
The iXpand can synchronise photos and videos from camera roll automatically when connected to the device, it’s easy to do, and frees up the phone’s memory, however it can take a lot of time if you have several thousand of photographs on your device (as can be evident, in our case we have almost 8000 photographs on the iPhone and it’s taken us nearly two hours to transfer all of them). After sync is complete, you have an option to delete all the photos from your device so you can free up space on your phone.
The iXpand comes in 16GB, 32GB, 64GB & 128GB capacities, you can get the 32GB version for AED375, which is a great deal when you want to overcome your phone’s storage capacity limitations.
Pros
portable
long-lasting charge
cleanly designed app
Cons
Battery guzzler on the iPhone
USB cap can be easily misplaced/lost
Verdict
A great addition to anyone’s arsenal, the iXpand may be tiny, but it packs quite a punch. Pop into a bag and you’re good to go. Good for backing up your photos as well as ensuring you can never run out of storage on your device whilst you’re on the move and don’t necessarily have a laptop with you to transfer the photos off your Apple device.
