Many users believe that it’s only with Android that one can use an OTG connector and get the device talking to an external drive to share or store files. Provided the smartphone or tablet is OTG capable. While the options for iOS devices are limited, they do exist.

SanDisk has a series of iXpand flash drives with a lightning connector at one end and a regular USB at the other. That means you can use it with your iPhone or iPad and with anything that takes a USB, such as a PC or a Mac.

These drives come in different storage options from 16 GB to 256 GB, starting at a little under ₹3,000; but of course as you go up the storage scale, they get quite expensive. We looked at an iXpand Mini Flash Drive with 32 GB of storage. It connected easily enough with an iPad and an iPhone but immediately prompts downloading an iXpand app. This is neither something you can do without nor should because it brings on board a whole set of features. Once the app recognises the connected drive, you’ll be led through a tour of the features that make this accessory something more than just a blank slate of storage space. The drive and app work together to back up your photos and videos, for example, freeing up very precious space on the device. If your social media posts are really special to you, you can save a lot of the media from your networks. If you’re a big movie watcher or love carrying around music that isn’t just streamed online, the app will recognise and play different formats without you having to go hunting for solutions.

It’s a sort of file manager that makes accessing everything stored much easier. We did, however, find a few annoyances such as repeated requests to give permission to the drive and device to work together, but this may be because both the iPad and iPhone were on the beta version of iOS 11, the upgrade coming soon to Apple’s mobile devices.

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