Things have settled down after yesterday’s amazing earnings call. There was no AWT News Update yesterday, but feast your ears (and eyes) on today’s news:
- Walgreens is launching support for Walgreens Balance Reward loyalty card in Apple Pay
- Why the iPhone doesn’t use wireless charging
- Didn’t pre-order an Apple TV? Don’t fret, just get to an Apple Store on Friday
- Digital scale app “Gravity” gets rejected by Apple
Whoops! No text version today thanks to a sync problem. But we do have video for you.
Last month, AWT reviewed the PhotoFast MAX, a small USB/Lightning adapter with flash RAM built into it. MAX works with a PhotoFast app to enable fast and easy transfers of data between Mac or PC and iOS devices. Now the company is nearing the end of an Indiegogo campaign to fund manufacturing of a similar product called the MemoriesCable. I was able to get my hands on a pre-production version of the MemoriesCable for testing, and here are my thoughts on the new product.
First, the MemoriesCable — which comes in 16, 32, 64 and 128 GB varieties — performs many of the same functions as the PhotoFast MAX. In other words, it’s a great place to store those gigabytes of music, video and photos that would have otherwise filled the internal storage of your iPhone. The app used with the MemoriesCable is even the same — the free i-FlashDrive ONE app.
So you can do a lot of the same things that were available with the PhotoFast MAX — copy media off of a Mac or PC into the built-in storage of the MemoriesCable, play media stored on the Cable on your iOS device, and do backups of media and data on your iOS device. But there’s more to this new product…
It looks like a charging cable and sure enough, it can be used as a charging cable. Plug it into a Mac, PC or any other 5V USB power source and your iPhone can get a charge. But the cable also adds an very useful function, automatically backing your iPhone while it’s charging. That’s perfect for people who don’t use the automatic iCloud backup capability.
The MemoriesCable would have been a perfect accessory on my recent vacation, making it possible to carry just one cable rather than a charging cable and a flash drive. Since I was on a ship with really slow satellite Internet service as well, the Memories Cable could have kept my devices safely backed up while at sea.
In use, I found the MemoriesCable to work at speeds similar to that of the PhotoFast MAX card. There was no worry about whether or not the cable would work properly with the iPhone, as it has received Apple MFi certification.
The MemoriesCable comes in USB 2.0 (starting at $49 for 16GB and running up to $99 for 64GB) and USB 3.0 (starting at $99 for 32GB and topping out at $149 for 128GB) versions.
Conclusion
I don’t often give pre-production hardware a “star rating”, but the PhotoFast MemoriesCable worked very admirably in testing and I like the way it works. With the clip built onto its short cable, the MemoriesCable folds over into a tiny package that can escort you anywhere. If you want to be one of the first to get a MemoriesCable next month, be sure to back the Indiegogo project as soon as possible
