Hands-on review: Adata’s UC330 Phone to USB thumb drive
Here's a toughie. I needed to quickly back up everything on my Huawei P8 smartphone before I updated its firmware so it'd work with Android Wear.
The obvious answer would have been a Micro SD card, however my 64GB card had mysteriously vanished, (it was probably sent back in one of the smartphones I'd reviewed).
Backing up to the cloud sounds great in practice but can be more hit than miss when it comes to backing up the entire contents of a 32 GB smartphone, not to mention that it can take forever and blow my tiny data allowance to pieces.
Adding even more complexity to things, I needed access to some of the photos and videos stored on my P8 so I could show off some pics from a recent holiday.
I could connect my phone to a PC with a USB cable, but the only micro USB I could lay my hands on was in my laptop bag which was not at home.
Clearly what was needed was something a little more versatile. Something with the portability of a USB thumb stick that allowed for easy file sharing that'd work with both my phone and PC yet have enough storage to hold everything stored on my phone.
Then I stumbled upon the ADATA UC330 Flash drive which will connect to a smartphones micro USB port as well as a standard USB port on a PC or Mac.
Look and feel
There really isn't much to the ADATA UC330. At one end there is a regular USB plug and at the other a Micro USB plug.
When I say there isn't much to it, I'm really not kidding, it is incredibly petite, weighing in at a mere 3.6 grams. It has a plastic cap fitted that fits onto a lanyard or key-ring.
This mightn't sound like a big deal but is definitely a good idea as the UC330 is so small that I found it incredibly easy to misplace or forget.
The UC330 is crafted out of alloy which makes it a tough wee widget. Where most thumb drives are crafted out of Tupperware and seem to disintegrate within weeks, the ADATA US330 is built like a brick you-know-what house and looks be able to take life on the end of a key-ring or lanyard.
In use
Performance-wise there really isn't much to fault; it does exactly what it says on the box. On the PC end of things, it is USB 2 so it won't break any speed records.
Given the relatively small amounts of data being transferred and/or stored, the lack of USB 3.0 speed shouldn't be a deal breaker.
Getting started is dead easy. Thanks to it's baked in OTG capabilities, plugging the ADATA UC330 into my android phone saw it mount as a drive. I was easily able to transfer files and was also able to stream media it as well.
Verdict
In the end, backing up my phone was not only dead easy but a quick and hassle free process using the ADATA UC330 which has also acquitted itself well as a tiny but seriously useful USB thumb drive for transferring files between PCs and phones.
The ADATA UC330 comes in 4 flavours, based around capacity. These range from 8GB/16GB through to 32GB. The ADATA UC330 is proof that good things do come in small packages.
