Review: Leef Bridge 3.0

Anyone who's had to move files from an Android phone or tablet to a Mac or PC knows the dance: call it the Three-Step Drag.

First, you e-mail the file or upload it to a cloud storage site like Dropbox or Google Drive. Next you open the email and download the attachment, or get the file from the cloud server. And finally you open the file on your computer. It's all fine and good if you have an Internet or network connection. But for those times when neither are available, Leef's Bridge 3.0 flash drive provides a flexible, if somewhat frustrating, alternative.

This little drive comes with both full-sized and a micro USB connectors. Housed in a black plastic slide-and-lock tray, each connector is exposed by pressing on a center button and pushing forward or backward. Plug it in and you can stream or copy content to and from your Android phone, tablet, PC, or Mac. It's easy. When it works.

The drive itself is designed for Android devices with Jelly Bean 4.1 or higher, Mac OS X or later, Windows XP (SP3) and later, as well as Linux Kernal 2.6 or later computers. All told, the Leef Bridge is supposedly compatible with some 40 Android phones and 16 tablets. Some of these devices can read and write data from the Leef drives with their native Android operating system, but most require the assistance of third party file management apps available for free (or a fee) in the Google Play store. And that's where the problems arise.

To put the Leef Bridge through its paces I tested the drive on two tablets: the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 and the Asus Google Nexus 7. From the myriad available file management apps, I installed the Leef-recommended Astro File Manager and the highly-rated Android crowd favorite, the ES File Explorer. Both are free.

The instant I inserted the Leef USB drive into each device's mini-USB ports, the notification area at the top of the screen indicated "USB mass storage connected." On the Galaxy Tab 3 the default native app, My Files, launched immediately. Although the two freeware apps offer more functionality (connection to cloud storage, customized layouts, and built-in media viewer), My Files, even in its basic simplicity, was able to transfer files in either direction between the device and the USB drive. The Nexus 7 tablet, on the other hand, has no native file manager and accordingly needed one of the downloaded file management apps to even recognize the inserted drive.

But no matter which file manager I launched, intuitive design seemed to be missing entirely. On both, it took a good deal of trial and error to figure out how to not only find the files I wanted to transfer, but once found, how to actually move them from one device to the other. You're presented with a vast array of folders, with a combination of obscure names and obvious names. Somehow we're supposed to know that the Android directory labeled "0" as in zero is where our files end up.

So while the Leef Bridge 3.0 itself works well, users still need to overcome the clumsiness of the file manager apps the drive typically needs to operate. Depending your level of frustration, you can take it or Leef it alone.