Review: A Smart Pen Drive For Android Smartphone Users

A pen drive is a tool that is usually used to store or transfer files, videos, music and pictures. But today the good old thumb drive has also become smart. SanDisk has launched a pen drive in India called Ultra Dual USB Drive. It is essentially the most useful of all pen drives for Android mobile phone users. This unique 16 GB USB drive has the usual USB 2.0 interface at one end and at the other end it has a Micro USB port.

So what can this pen drive do? Well, using the Micro USB port users can actually connect this neat contraption to any Android phone (with OTG capability) and transfer files from the phone directly to the USB drive. Users can also take complete backup of their smartphone onto the Dual USB Drive. All one needs to do is download SanDisk’s memory zone app from the Play Store and in couple of screen presses can backup videos, images and even contacts from the phone.

We tested the USB drive and it pretty much impressed us in most parts. The procedure or taking a backup of a smartphone and also restoring the backed up data is pretty simple. One does not need to know rocket science to backup or restore their smartphone data. The pen drive can also be used as source to transfer data from the phone to the PC. We were able to take a 6 GB data backup of our smartphone in under 25 minutes. This is a bit high, but considering the pen drive will backup everything (including important documents and contacts) from the phone, the time taken seems okay. From the PC we were able to transfer a 1.2 GB file to the pen drive in under 1 minute.

All this is good, but the SanDisk Ultra Dual USB drive is really useful when you want to change phones. The backup and restore process between two smartphones can really be tedious at times. After taking the backup of the old Android phone, plug the drive to the new phone, hit restore and you are done. However, you do require the Memory Zone app installed on your new phones as well. So make sure you download that first.

Overall we quite like the concept SanDisk presents. We tested the 16 GB version that can be picked up for Rs 900 (MRP 1,199) from most computer hardware shops. For people who require more storage space can go for the 64 GB version which retails for Rs 3,800.