What if there was an iPhone case that could add three major functions to the device? That is exactly what Charlie Corry set out to do when he came up with the iExpander. He made an iPhone case that adds support for microSD cards, charges your phone and improves the function of the camera's flash in low light situations.
Charging the phone and improving the flash are nice, but there are plenty of devices and cases that offer that. What piqued my interest was the ability to expand the memory on the device with a microSD card. I always wondered why Apple opted not to support memory cards, and if the iExpander goes off as planned, that won't be a problem anymore.
Of course, the iPhone does not recognize the memory as native, so you will have to use their app to copy data back and forth from the phone. Still, this is as close as I have seen to adding more memory to the iPhone in a functional way. Based on the video from Corry's Kickstarter page, which you can see at the bottom of this post, it looks simply to copy iPhone supported files back and forth between the microSD card and the phone.
Essentially, this works almost like an external hard drive for your iPhone. You will not be installing large apps to it and running them. It is a place to store extra pictures, documents, videos and other iPhone supported files and copy them when you need them. While not as good as native memory, it's pretty close.
The flash improvements with the iExpander are also quite impressive. It's not just an enhancement to the built-in flash. Instead, it's a second flash in the case that is designed to fire automatically when the iPhone's flash goes off. This is supposed to greatly enhance the quality of photos in low-light situations, which is a place the iPhone camera has always struggled.
The iExpander will reportedly also double your battery life. This is not really anything new, as plenty of cases such as the AQUA TEK S offer this feature. Still, it's a nice bonus when you factor in the other stuff this case can do. If the designers could just work in free data like FreedomPop's case, we would have the total package.
The iExpander campaign has just launched on Kickstarter. You can reserve your own case for a pledge of US$70. Corry and his team members plan on entering production at the end of November and shipping the devices to backers sometime in December.
Have a look at the video below to see the transfer app in action, and for more information on the device.
Source: Kickstarter
My question is how long it'll take the designer to redesign and ramp up for the iPhone 5...
I run out of memory all of the time. Most people by the 16G iPhone and trust me that it runs out of memory. Also, the cloud costs money every month. The memory on iExpander thing doesn't. Also, the price of this thing is less than buying just a battery pack plus you get expandable memory and a better camera. No brainer....I'm buying it.
Tony, if you think the future is the cloud, I hope you don't save passwords, or any [even remotely] sensitive information anywhere.. If it's "on the cloud", it is on multiple data servers, each having their own weak points, where people with malicious intent can find ways into the information stored. If I don't have my data on my device(s), then I don't know secure it really is..
You may or may not get an advance warning and time to download or move all your files.
This has happened many times with website hosting services, which are essentially the same as "the cloud". I've had websites go *poof* without warning when the hosting company went out of business and when they got bought out and all their servers shut down.