This looks interesting.
Leef Bridge dual USB / microUSB drive is compatible with Android devices, PCs and Macs
It eliminates the need for a OTG cable. I'm probably going to wait until July to see what the price of the 64GB is going to be.
The only thing I'm curios about is why after all these years of devices having microUSB connectors, is someone finally coming out with directly connectable USB drive now.
(just skip this post if you're not interested)
I can tell you why...
The reason is because USB is "device to host" type of connection, where one end of the connection is defined as the "device" and one end of the connection is defined as the "host". In most cases, your computer is the host and whatever you are plugging into it is the device. Along with this, the ends of the USB cable are actually different on both ends. One end is the "A" plug, which connects to the host, the other end is the "B" plug, which connects to the device. One important aspect of this is for power over USB, which only flows
from host
to device, but there are other reasons for this type of setup as well.
USB flash drives are "devices" and are designed to connect to a computer host, almost all of which use a standard-sized "A" receptacle, so making flash drives with mini- or micro- "A" plugs is practically unnecessary. Now, while pretty much all "A" receptacles on host devices are full size, the "B" receptacle on devices vary depending on device type, and are often in the mini or micro type.
For example, the USB cord that comes with the N10 (and almost all cell phones/tablets) has a full sized "A" plug and a micro sized "B" plug.
When you use the OTG cable to plug a flash drive into the tablet, what you're doing is telling the tablet to be the
HOST in the USB connection, even though you are connecting via a
DEVICE USB port. The USB drive you linked to actually has both a standard sized device-to-host "A" connector plug (as most USB Flash drives do) as well has a micro host-to-device "B" plug. Using this microUSB plug, of course the device you are connecting to, such as the N10 tablet would HAVE TO support using this "backwards" type setup (OTG). Up until recently, most cell phones/tablets didn't support USB OTG, so simply putting a micro USB "B" plug would have been almost useless, because anything you could have plugged it into wouldn't have been designed to host a USB device in the first place (since it was designed to be a USB "device" itself). The OTG cable traditionally acts as the bridge to circumvent the fact that in order for a device to act as a host in the OTG setup, you need to plug a device into a non-host port.
More info:
USB Connectors
USB Standard
USB OTG
for me the reader linked above plus a few micro SD cards create a smaller foot print than the handful of USB memory sticks. I also tend to buy the ruggedized versions of the USB sticks so I readily admit they are larget than the "normal ones"
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