How to Use a USB drive with an iPad or Android Tablet

This little device, available from Amazon for $39, will allow your iPhone, iPad, Android Phone, or Android tablet, to use any USB drive and read the contents. HooTooIt is just too cool! We first explored the uses for this travel router in Episode 55 of What Does This Button Do? At that time, we took it with us while on a sailboat in the Bahamas. We mostly used it as a battery charger for our phones, because it is a very powerful battery.

Recently a lot of people bought our Geeks on Tour Learning Library on USB. This is a thumb drive that holds all the content from our website. There are hundreds of tutorial videos on it, and some people want to play those videos on their iPad or other tablet. Well – tablets do not have regular USB ports, so this is not possible. Actually there are a few ways, but this little device has got to be about the easiest:

  1. Turn on the HooToo with the one button at the top, insert the USB drive you want to use in the slot provided
  2. HooToo Tripmate will show up as a WiFi network on your device – connect to it
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  3. Download and install the HooToo TripMate app and open it, you will see the folders on the USB drive. You can also see folders on your device – for purposes of copying back and forth.
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After performing those 3 simple steps, you will see the contents of the USB drive show up on the screen of your mobile device. How cool is that?! Find the video you want to play and tap it. It is now playing on your mobile device, no cables or adapters required, it’s all wireless. Your spouse or kids can connect to it at the same time and be watching other videos. It allows up to 4 simultaneous connections.

The HooToo Travel Router Serves Several Purposes

  1. To use a mobile device and access files on a USB drive
  2. To copy files back and forth between a mobile device and a USB drive
  3. To charge the battery of a mobile device
  4. To use an Ethernet connection to the Internet and turn it into your own Wi-Fi hotspot
  5. To “bridge” or be a wireless router – connecting to a Wi-Fi hotspot and re-transmitting as your own Wi-Fi hotspot

I already mentioned that we used it on a boat as a battery charger. Also while on the boat, we used it for copying photos from our phones to a USB drive for backup, then we connected our tablets to it for showing our pictures to our shipmates on the nice big screen.  Another time we used it was in a hotel that had an Ethernet cable in the room providing Internet. Two of us wanted to use the Internet connection, so we connected it to the HooToo, then we had our own Wi-Fi hotspot to use for connecting our devices to the Internet. We’ve also connected it to the Wi-Fi hotspot at a hotel and bridged to our own Wi-Fi hotspot so our devices didn’t need to change any settings.

There is also a newer model for 29.99 with a smaller battery but updated components.