![]() A lot of the screen is wasted on a huge graphic showing how much free space there is on your phone. Icons and navigation cues are far from standard, leaving you guessing what to do quite often. It was only later that we discovered that the app has modules for backing up photos, contacts and calendars. Seeing no reason it should be allowed to do any of these things, we declined. For starters, it threw up a barrage of permission prompts upon the first use: it wanted to send notifications and access our calendar, contacts and photos. The app isn't particularly well designed and we needed a little while to get used to it. Searching for 'Strontium' won't bring up anything useful, which is not a surprise considering the iDrive itself is just a rebranded PhotoFast drive. That saves you the trouble of searching through the App Store, which is good because the app in question is the one PhotoFast created for its own products. IOS accessories are allowed to prompt you to download an app (or launch it if you have it already), and that's what happens every time you plug the Nitro iDrive in. That means the only way to access anything on the Strontium Nitro iDrive is through its own app. You can't browse the contents of your iPhone or iPad to find documents and then decide how they should be opened. You'll also need to take your iPhone or iPad out of any cover it might be in, unless enough space around the Lightning port is exposed to accommodate the Nitro iDrive.Īpple forces iOS apps to stay within their own pools of storage, and there's no way to make them recognise files stored anywhere else. In that sense, you can't really use it to permanently add more storage space to your phone. You're much better off using it to swap files onto your iPhone or iPad rather than leaving it plugged in. It's awkward to hold and use devices with this block sticking out of them, especially when on the move. That and its sharp edges make it hard to imagine using an iPhone with the Nitro iDrive plugged in all the time. When plugged into an iPhone or iPad, the Nitro iDrive will stick out quite conspicuously. PhotoFast has been developing such drives for Apple devices since at least 2011 - the first model featured a 30-pin connector for older devices. The rear is a little more interesting - apart from the usual regulatory logos, there's a line saying "Powered by PhotoFast" which tells us that Strontium's product is pretty much identical to the PhotoFast i-Flash Drive. A status LED shines red through the plastic in one corner when the drive is plugged in to a PC and blue when plugged in to an iOS device. There's a Strontium logo on the front with the capacity printed below it in a needlessly large point size. The white plastic can also get slippery and so we weren't happy at all with the ergonomics. The edges and corners are extremely sharp - enough so that we scratched ourselves quite badly multiple times. The two ends are capped with clear plastic removable lids, which seem like they'd be easy to lose track of. The front and back bulge outwards while the sides, top and bottom are flat. The Strontium Nitro iDrive USB 3.0 is a bit larger than the chunkiest pen drives available today. ![]() ![]() ![]() We're going to examine how it works and whether it is the solution you've always wanted. While the Nitro iDrive USB 3.0 looks and feels like a standard pen drive - especially the dual-connector ones now available for use with Android devices - you can't simply plug it to give your Apple device a magical storage boost. Strontium is one of a few companies launching external modules that plug into iOS devices' Lightning ports for a storage boost. 16GB fills up very quickly when you take lots of photos and videos, or if you need lots of apps. The idea is that users never have to be faced with pointless choices about what goes where, and security barriers are more important than interoperability.Īpple has not exactly been generous with storage, and most people buy base models with less space than they'd ideally like because of the high cost of stepping up. Not only has there never been support for storage expansion, but you are restricted from browsing through the contents of your device so you can at least see what's going on. Since the very first iPhone came out over eight years ago, Apple has adamantly refused to let users manage their own storage. ![]()
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