One of the biggest complaints about the Palm Pre when it was first announced, was the lack of an SD card slot. Thanks to an interesting device called the AirStash, we may have a solution for the webOS. According the company’s latest tweet, it works fully with the Palm Pre and and Palm Pixi.
If you can make it through the above video’s strong iPhone content, you’ll be able to see how the device works. Think of it like a wireless thumb drive, using a media server. Basically, the AirStash creates a wifi access point that you can connect your device to, and stream files from it. And rather than having a predefined flash memory size, it has an SD/SDHC slot supporting up to 32GB.
The beauty of the AirStash is that once you’re connected to it from your device, all you need to do is go to a particular URL in the web browser and you’ll be able to use an HTML5-enchanced web file viewer interface. In it, you can stream and download any files from the SD/SDHC card.
The AirStash is still quite a new product and as such, is only currently available in Canada and the USA. According to the company’s FAQs page, the battery life can last up to 5 hours of video streaming, which isn’t too bad.
There a few catches though. For one, file uploads must be done via the usb adapter (or via a SD/SDHC card reader), though a future firmware is planned to allow file uploading via wifi. In addition, it doesn’t seem as though the wifi access point offers any sort of security, so other people could possibly connect to to access point and view your files.
If that doesn’t bother you, the AirStash is available on their website for $99 USD.
