Saturday 1 March 2014

New improved PQI Air Card II?

The original Air Card has been around for some time now, so an update would not be surprising. And right on queue, at least as of early Jan 2014, the PQI website has been quietly showing images of the new Air Card II product. Some Googling around suggests murmurs since as early as Step 2013 even. The obvious physical differences are a new blue body and more dramatically, a new 90° transposition of the microSDHC slot.
Unlike the original Air Card's side slotted design,  the new version has a rear ended access point, allowing users to conveniently swap out the MicroSDHC card without need for ejecting the Air Card from the device it is already inserted. It is certainly an improvement I am very interested in. Notice the new card has added the SD card read/write protection switch on the side too, which is a handy feature the original missed out on.

There are no other indications of any additional internal changes since the original design, but even so, I'd still wait for the newer version puely for the relocated slot positioning. The Air Card was already attractive for its novelty of letting users upgrade the memory with their own larger and faster MicroSD cards as they pleased. None of my existing SD WiFi cards let me do that.

Some fantasy features I'd hope the newer AirCard II brings would be faster U1 microSDHC even microSCXC card support, 64G, even 128G card support, improved power efficiency and faster WiFi transfers... But realistically, PQI has not promised us any of these. Just my wishful thinking.

There is a WikiDevi entry that makes mention of the newer Air Card II but nowhere else. PQI Air Card II (A201) - https://wikidevi.com/wiki/PQI_Air_Card_II_(A201)
Since finding out its existence, I have been searching local stores but they only stocked the original version. I finally contacted the local distributer for PQI products but disappointingly, even they were unable to give a release date.

Let's keeps our eyes peeled for this new revision of this WiFi enabled SD card.

If you work for PQI, please get in touch with me because I want one! Yesterday!

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