16GB of portable storage with support for wireless transfer
The Leyio is an oddity – a matchbox-sized personal storage device styled and marketed to appeal to young people, yet with features more likely to attract a professional market.
It costs £159.99, but why buy one when you can get a USB key with the same 16GB capacity for around £25?
The Leyio has a 1.5in OLED screen, which lets you view photos and list files. There are two layers of security: a fingerprint sensor that you also use to flick through file listings and a nested USB drive that can be pulled out to transfer files to a PC. This drive empties when you plug it back in, blocking possible malware.
It’s possible to plug any USB drive into the device’s second port in order to swap data. The Leyio can be directly connected to a PC for charging or file transfer, when it appears as a standard USB drive.
The Leyio’s main party trick is that you can literally throw data from one device to another. First you pair the two devices by holding them close and pressing a button on each. Then you choose a folder or file that you want to transfer and flick the Leyio as if you were throwing it away.
This feature is fun and quite impressive. But for now, possibly forever, it can’t be used for anything really useful, such as extracting pictures from a digital camera, because the data is sent using Ultrawideband (UWB) radio technology, which now seems unlikely to be widely adopted.
The transfers are nowhere near as fast as UWB proponents promised. Leyio claims 80Mbits/sec and we clocked 60Mbits/sec, similar to 802.11n wireless, though probably easier on batteries.
The Leyio is an interesting proof of concept, but we aren’t convinced its unique features make it a must-have purchase.
