Even in today’s age of Cloud storage, we still desire some way of getting our stuff from our PCs onto our smartphones. Whether it be documents, music, images or movies – whatever it is, it can’t all be stored in the cloud for us to simply bring down whenever we want. Still, we don’t all have microUSB cables stuff into our back pockets as we go about our daily business, either so, Toshiba has come up with a somewhat wireless solution to such a problem. The TransferJet system for Android devices allows you to transfer large amounts of data from your smartphone to your PC and vice versa. It’s not entirely wireless however, as the two dongles need to be in pretty close proximity to each other but, unlike Bluetooth it is a lot faster and makes large file transfers feasible.
It’s been in development for some time now, and first showed its head at CES 2013 (remember that?) and now, it’s on sale in Japan for roughly $40. There’s no word on an international release but, there’s no reason for Toshiba to keep this a Japan-only product. It sounds like a neat solution to a problem but, not a lot of people have that problem and it’s not all that universal. For one thing, it requires Android 4.0 or above and for another it’s only available for Windows 7 and 8, which puts Linux and Mac users out of luck. Where the TransferJet does make sense however, is in its ability to be easily carried around with you. It’s easily attachable to a set of keys and could theoretically completely replace the microUSB cable in your bag, at least for transfers. As with most things though, drivers will keep you from simply plugging this into any PC you come across around the office.
While it’s not perfect, as Android Community rightly point out it is an innovative approach to file transfer, if only it had a more usable range and didn’t require drivers every time you go from PC-to-PC.