While most of my content goes straight to the cloud these days and is usually easily accessible to move around, download or stream from any of my devices, I still found myself getting a lot of use out of Hyper’s new iStick. It’s one of the first made-for-iPhone USB flash drives that also includes an integrated Lightning connector to easily transfer content to and from the device to others. Hyper’s companion app is what makes the experience more than just storage, however…
The iStick is much like your standard USB thumb drive, but a small switch allows you to expose either the standard USB connector (the one that will connect to your computer) or the integrated Lightning connector (which connects to your iPhone or iPad). The overall build quality of the all-plastic design feels solid enough, and I didn’t have any fears of the switch breaking after using it regularly for the last month or so.
The key to iStick is the companion app of the same name. It presents users with four main options on launch: iPhone for accessing local files, iStick for viewing files on the drive, Contacts for backing up and restoring address book contacts, and Photo Library for backing up photos from your iPhone to the drive.
Most of these functions work great. Backing up photos is as simple as you’d hope and lets you select multiple photos at once while viewing your iPhone’s camera roll and other photo folders. The iStick function lets you view files you’ve dumped on the drive and easily stream music and movies or open documents in other apps. With all the cloud services many people use for storage these days, there’s still no cloud solution to carrying several GBs worth of movies or other content and being able to stream it on a plane or other location where internet access isn’t available or reliable (not to mention how that would impact your data cap). That alone might be worth the cost of the premium iStick demands over the typical USB drive.
The Contacts feature, which lets you backup and restore contacts on the iPhone, is also super easy to use and worked without hiccups in my time with the device.
One great use for the iStick is making back ups of important files when backing up to the cloud isn’t possible or convenient. The experience is somewhat frustrating when you want to transfer files from your iOS device onto the drive, however. It’s mostly Apple’s fault, to be fair, as the iStick has no way of tapping into iOS and displaying all available files on local storage (those that you saved from apps like Pages and other content storage and creation apps). That means to transfer files from iPhone to the iStick drive, you have to first manually use the iOS “Open in another app” feature to transfer the file to the iStick app. For a document in Pages, that means 5 taps to transfer a single document to the iStick app and no option for transferring multiple files at once. Other apps might not even support the feature. It’s not ideal if you were planning on using the iStick to dump a large number of files from a specific iOS app.
That app design leaves a bit to be desired, but all the functions for moving, copying, renaming and organizing files you’d expect are present. There’s also an option in the app to format and wipe the drive clean with one tap (and a confirmation to avoid accidents).
If streaming content you don’t want taking up space on your device is your motiivation, the company says the app’s hardware accelerated video decoder supports a wide variety of non-iOS native video formats like MP4, M4V, MPV, MOV, MPG, MKV, AVI, WMV, RMVB, FLV, 3GP, GIF.”
For me in most situations using my Synology Diskstation NAS or other cloud services to sync, store, share, and stream content is my go-to solution, but without an internet connection that strategy becomes useless. I’ve also been known to carry a physical copy of important projects when traveling or on the go just in case the cloud gives me a problem when arriving at my destination. That’s also now an option for iOS projects or presentations with the iStick, allowing me to leave my Mac at home. When the cloud won’t cut it, iStick might be the only option.
Hyper’s iStick is available now in 8GB ($80), 16GB ($100), 32GB ($140), 64GB ($200), and 128GB ($350) in both black and white.
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The prices make this is a total non-starter.
Micro USB —- USB 3 with 32GB is only 16$ on Ebay.
Just 2cm-1cm-4mm ;-)
My thought chain while reading this article: Huh? Wow! Interesting. Clever. Nice :) Errr… HOW MUCH? Moving on.
Don’t get me wrong it looks nice and well made polish but I rather add that money to upgrade my iPhone memory
It is difficult for you to upgrade your iPhone’s RAM (random access memory).
Or were you talking about increasing the amount of your iPhone’s storage?
Yes I mean the storage
Great idea ruined by being waaaaaaaay too expensive. Not only is it too expensive, but they’re playing the capacity bump pricing game that puts Apple to shame.
The base model of 8GB is $80. Well, that’s not much, but 8GB isn’t very usable. But if you were to add the price of a 128GB of $50 (Amazon has one for $43.50), you should get $130. Instead it’s $350.
And while this is slick, it’s not really solving a problem as there are a huge number of wireless USB storage to iOS options… many providing you with a plain USB port for whatever the device or with an SD slot for using your own cards.
I picked up a Kingston MobileLite which takes an SD card or any USB device plus a 1 TB Toshiba portable hard drive for a total of less than $100. Bulkier than the iStick but a lot more storage and a hell of a lot less expensive.
Also look at the read and write speeds of the iStick, slow even by USB 2.0 standards.
What is this, 2007? The price per GB for a flash drive is below $1.00. Who’s going to pay $10/GB in 2014???
Also, the design for this gadget is terrible, it’s so wide that it would block access to surrounding ports on my computer.
Lightning or not Lightning, the price is ridiculous!
Sounded interesting until I saw the prices
I ordered the 64gb metal version thru kickstarted and was one of the early supporters. They are expecting it to ship around mid October instead of the original September date. I paid $149 which at the time was 50% off. Since then, I have purchased a 128gb iPhone 6 and pretty much have less need for this product. Good idea but bad timing.
How’d you get yours? I’m a KS backer and I’m still waiting :/
I was sent a review unit from the company. It was pre-production unit. It doesn’t look as pretty as the one you’ll receive, but it’s the same product as far as the internals and this review goes.
Cool idea…if I ever wanted anything like that sticking out of the bottom of my iPhone for any length of time.
It’s still pretty crappy these are available commercially before those of us that paid for ours months ago have yet to receive them!
The only thing I see here is iStick wants to stick it to our bank accounts! Reevaluate your pricing because it is way to damn high!
LMFAO @ $350 for 128 GB.
All these ridiculous workarounds because Apple insists on gimping iOS. There is NO EXCUSE to forbid users from accessing USB drives from an iDevice.
Another surprise I got today: Apple forbids iPhone 6+ owners from using Apple’s Lightning SD card reader to import photos.
Does Apple not realize these are all trivial tasks on Android? Why do they hate users like me who just want to use the device for which I paid good money?
Although Apple makes great products, they are not for business people and when third-parties try to create something to support the business world, they have to face the hard reality….Apple won’t allow anybody to make things easier, their poor interoperability among apps and systems is excessive and will always be an obstacle to people who use their smartphones/tablet for something more than email, browsing and games.
Ignoring the fact that 90+% of Fortune 500 companies have switched to iOS.
Apple probably works fine while the cloud is accessible but try to save a word document to a back up or send it to an external drive for safety or sharing and I’m stuffed. I can email it—well no because I don’t have the Internet available at the time. Using a seagate wireless drive is only good if you want to read office documents created else where and stored on the drive but create anything on the iPad and its stuck in the pad until the Internet comes back? Not helpful at all.
Staggeringly overpriced for a USB 2.0 device that lets you choose which connector to let get dirty. A technological joke of massive proportions.
Don’t understand how it works, if u turn the switch one way and plug in the iphone, how can u plug in the other end when the usb connector is still not protracted outwards. and if u flick the switch to bring the usb out, the iphone surely disconnects?
It’s not meant to have both plugged in at the same time. That’s what your cable is for; this is a flash drive with a Lightning connector.
That seems to be a good copy of viceversal from Rexplore!
http://rexplore.com/flash-drive-rexplored/
(Yanko Design 25 January 2013 http://www.yankodesign.com/2013/01/25/the-only-data-storage-you-need/)
So, uh, guys? Just yesterday I found the “Natusun i-FlashDisk 32GB” on MiniInTheBox for $78 shipped. Considering that that even supports iOS 5, it probably came out a long time before what you just reviewed.
Price makes ZERO sense.
If you’re familiar with Hyper the price makes perfect sense.
Based on the price, this product has a specialised market. For me, it is worth it because I am not willing to put files into the cloud for a number of business reasons. This will allow me to carry my files with me so I can work on them from iPhone or iPad while away from office or in an emergency while on vacation. For me, the 128Gb model is well worth that convenience.
There are other ways to carry and access files while on the go, but the ease of use of the included software is what sold me on the iStick. Based on Kickstarter response, I am not alone – but from the comments here, it sure feels like I’m alone!
If Hyper made this a fast USB 3.0 device and cut the price by 75%, every iDevice user would buy them by the dozen. As it stands it only appeals to a very tiny niche.
Have any users been able to determine if the lightning connection will work with a phone in a case such as Life Proof?
Some cases leave the entire bottom free, if yours doesn’t then you’ll need an extension cable or remove the case. The iStick is poorly engineered. Too squat to support most cases, too wide to allow anything to be plugged into adjacent ports on most laptops.
Can it be ANY cheaper? I mean $80? Seriously?