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USB Thumb Drive to iPad - How?

Young Turk

Young Turk

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 9, 2002
497
67
As a lawyer, I regularly attend seminars, and more and more, seminar materials are in PDF form, and handed out via a USB thumb drive. The iPad would be a great tool to take to seminars, but it doesn't have a USB drive. How then would I get a thumb drive into an iPad?

P.S. - Despite this obvious (even if temporary) shortcoming, I pre-ordered on day 1 a 32 gb Wi-Fi iPad.

Young Turk
 
anthonymoody

anthonymoody

macrumors 68040
Aug 8, 2002
3,060
1,151
Young Turk said:
As a lawyer, I regularly attend seminars, and more and more, seminar materials are in PDF form, and handed out via a USB thumb drive. The iPad would be a great tool to take to seminars, but it doesn't have a USB drive. How then would I get a thumb drive into an iPad?

Young Turk
Click to expand...

Well hopefully a 3rd party will come out with a dongle for that :) But if not worst case you could ask a fellow attendee to email it to you?
 
B

blackNBUK

macrumors 6502a
Feb 19, 2010
607
35
UK
anthonymoody said:
Well hopefully a 3rd party will come out with a dongle for that :) But if not worst case you could ask a fellow attendee to email it to you?
Click to expand...

The USB dongle in the Camera Connection Kit may technically be capable of accessing a thumb drive. It depends on whether the iPad acts as a USB host or whether the dongle itself is the USB host and the thumb drive and iPad are USB slaves. Obviously it also depends on Apple supporting this use.
 
Young Turk

Young Turk

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 9, 2002
497
67
elfxmilhouse said:
you failed to mention how the OP would get the contents of the usb drive onto dropbox.
Click to expand...

That is correct. One inelegant workaround would be to bring my MacBook Air (in addition to the iPad) to the first day of a seminar, and transfer the thumb drive contents to it, and in turn either my iDisk or DropBox, which I use and highly recommend. Once on iDisk or DropBox, I can access it freely with my iPad.

Still, there must be a better way.

Young Turk
 
GeekLawyer

GeekLawyer

macrumors 68020
Jun 2, 2007
2,281
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The post is coming from inside the house!
Young Turk said:
Still, there must be a better way.
Click to expand...
There are a couple of other ways, though I'm not sure they're better. You could take your USB drive to the business center or concierge desk (if available) and upload the contents to iDisk using a desktop. Or use a borrowed laptop from a fellow seminarian to do the same.

When I organize CLE trainings I email the documents to attendees ahead of time. I have seen USB drives distributed. And also CDs. No matter what: it beats the old days of three-ring binders with hundreds of pages I'll (maybe) read once.
 
G

GadgetX

macrumors regular
Mar 6, 2010
195
0
darngooddesign said:
No 3rd party solution will work if the OS can't do it.
Click to expand...
The OS can do it. OS 3.0 allows third party apps to accept data coming from a device connected to the dock connector. I believe any data transferred is only accessible through the app that copied it but if that app has a pdf viewer youre good.
 
Eso

Eso

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Aug 14, 2008
2,032
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abijnk said:
That's why a third party solution would be the best and most likely solution.
Click to expand...

By best solution, I assume you mean short of Apple having just put a USB port with thumbdrive support on the iPad in the first place, right?
 
L

lilo777

macrumors 603
Nov 25, 2009
5,144
0
Young Turk said:
As a lawyer, I regularly attend seminars, and more and more, seminar materials are in PDF form, and handed out via a USB thumb drive. The iPad would be a great tool to take to seminars, but it doesn't have a USB drive. How then would I get a thumb drive into an iPad?

P.S. - Despite this obvious (even if temporary) shortcoming, I pre-ordered on day 1 a 32 gb Wi-Fi iPad.

Young Turk
Click to expand...

Does it really matter? I bet you'll have your laptop with you anyways :D
 
E

EddyP

macrumors 6502
Feb 12, 2010
468
0
CristobalHuet said:
Hopefully a jailbreak hack comes out that allows you to use the camera USB connector as a full-out USB port with flash drives. :cool:
Click to expand...
Agreed. I would think someone will come up with the software hack to use the camera/USB adapter with a flash drive or other drive.

It would be nice to be able to pull data (movies, music, PDFs) directly off of a flash drive or external hard drive without using iTunes. I'd bet it will happen.
 
N

Niiro13

macrumors 68000
Feb 12, 2008
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0
Illinois
I'm sure this is possible with a 3rd party solution. They'd just have to make a hardware dongle and use it with their application. So if Dropbox decided to add a dongle, then it'd be possible. But seeing as they haven't done this with the iPhone/iPod touch, it might just not be.
 
N

nateharr

macrumors 6502
Jun 17, 2009
331
2
RoyalKay said:
Might want to look at http://www.airstash.com. Looks really interesting.
Click to expand...

This wouldn't help the OP I don't think.

Documents are passed around from a few thumbdrives the professor owns to the entire class. (From my understanding.)

There would be no way to get the file from that thumbdrive to the airstash without a computer transfer. (Which is what the OP wants to avoid.)

The airstash does look really cool though.
 
abijnk

abijnk

macrumors 68040
Oct 15, 2007
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Los Angeles, CA
darngooddesign said:
No 3rd party solution will work if the OS can't do it.
Click to expand...

As someone else pointed out, this is the definition of a third party solution. A small piece of hardware with the accompanying app to supplement the current features of the iPad. It's completely doable.

Eso said:
By best solution, I assume you mean short of Apple having just put a USB port with thumbdrive support on the iPad in the first place, right?
Click to expand...

Yes, I was starting from reality.
 
funkyc

funkyc

macrumors regular
Sep 20, 2008
188
0
i'm hoping that there will be usb connectivity to my ipad too
or else i'll just be using it to surf the net and that would be kinda pointless...
 
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