Kingston updates its microUSB stick to transfer faster to your PCs

While we’re big fans of on-the-go USB sticks — thumbdrives that can plug into both a smartphone and a computer for easy transfers — our pet peeve is easily that they’re always USB 2.0, but Kingston is fixing this.

It’s a device that most smartphone owners should probably own one of, and it is where the USB stick is going: a thumbdrive that has the potential to be plugged directly into both a phone and a tablet.

Imation was one of the first to reveal them to Australians, with Toshiba, LG, SanDisk, and a bunch of other players since then showing off their own products to do the same thing, which basically is a USB flash drive with two separate plugs: a USB connector for a computer, and a microUSB connector at the other end for a phone.

While they won’t work on an iPhone — sorry, they use Lightning and iPod docks — Android devices do get to play with these products, which let you transfer files from a computer to a phone without plugging both in simultaneously. Essentially, it’s a USB drive that you can plug in to your computer, and then later on to your phone, or the other way around.

But one problem with these products has been that they have previously been limited to USB 2.0 speeds, and now that USB 3.0 has been in products for a number of years, that’s an issue, and one that really makes a difference if you’re trying to move big files from your phone — such as those 4K videos you’re shooting on your smartphone — back to a computer.

Memory maker Kingston will be providing a fix for this in the form of a new flash drive that couples in both USB 3.0 and microUSB, making it possible to transfer as much as 64GB with faster write times than the USB 2.0 equivalents.

Called the DataTraveler microDuo 3, it looks more or less the same as the other on-the-go sticks, but just has that USB 3.0 technology on-board, meaning faster speeds with a computer that supports USB 3.0.

The Kingston DataTraveler microDuo 3 will be available in stores everywhere in 16, 32, and 64GB capacities in August.