USB Capability on Your iPad

We know it's rare for us to discuss about jailbreaking issues in "My Tech, My Life", but here is some small tips we thought might be useful for our fellow freshmen out there.

First, we all know that one of the best features and benefits of jailbreaking your iPad is that you get a USB reading capability. For those who are not quite sure what we am talking about, it basically unlock your iPad, allowing it to read the various content in your USB drive, using Apple's pure white CCK (camera connection kit). Bear in mind, it's not just reading the photos and videos in your SD card or camera; it's more than that. With a jailbroken iPad, you can open your word documents, PDF, ePub files, mp3, and much more, right from your pendrive! Exactly! Your hear me right! And it's doesn't just stop there. You can even transfer some light word processing documents directly to your Pages and Numbers apps. Small sized videos with mp4 format can be transferred to your 3rd party video apps, so far it works successful with the Flex Player, which can be downloaded from the App Store with absolutely no charges. Besides that, another notable feature is that ePub and PDF ebooks can also be transferred right into your iBooks app. That's especially useful if you have a lot of ebooks and have limited storage in your iPad. 

Yes, pretty convenient, isn't it? But, we have identified a problem here recently. We noticed that many of the USB drives out there require much more power than the iPad itself can support. Take an example of a Toshiba branded 4GB thumbdrive that we used for testing. It's stated by iPad that "The connected USB device requires too much power". And it's not just that, some of the "Pendrive" branded thumbdrives share the same connectivity issue as well. So what should you do? How do you make sure that your flash device is compatible? Here's a simple tip for all of you, we have tested on most of the 8GB Kingston branded thumbdrives and they work wonderfully on our test units. We have used it to read and transfer files and documents smoothly, and only encounter problem while attempting to transfer music to the default music player. However, we are glad that the transfer still works on third party apps like Golden Ear, which costs $7.99 USD in the App Store. 

And in case you don't know, you have to download the iFile app from Cydia  to perform the tasks above. 

For those who don't want to jailbreak their iPad, don't worry, you still have your iTunes and sync cable :)