By all metrics, Kingston’s wireless Wi-Drive has been a successful product: the company is still selling it two years later, and has since refreshed it with beefier storage and Android compatibility. If there’s one thing customers complained about, though, it was the lack of expandable memory — a problem if you used all the space on the drive, or if you already had stuff stored on an SD card. With that in mind, the company’s coming out with the MobileLite Wireless, which ditches internal storage in favor of an SD slot and USB 2.0 port. (It will also ship with a microSD adapter.) At the same time, it packs a modest five-hour battery you can use to recharge USB-powered gadgets; Kingston says there’s enough juice in there to fully charge a phone, but probably not a tablet.

Technically speaking, you can access everything stored on the device by typing the MobileLite’s IP address into a browser. But for all intents and purposes, this is currently an iOS exclusive, as that’s the only platform for which you can download an app. As with the Wi-Drive, though, Kingston plans to add an Android app, as well as one for WP8. In the beginning, at least, it will be available through just a couple sellers (Amazon and Staples), with street prices expected to fall somewhere between $ 50 and $ 70. Any questions? We hope not: this thing’s aimed squarely at mainstream users, so if Engadget readers don’t get it, we’re going to be seriously concerned about all the regular folk.

Filed under: Storage, Mobile

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