Akasa Internal Cardreader with Bluetooth Review

While we can’t really access the performance of this internal card readers like we would with other variants, we can at least give you our opinions on how well this device worked.

First and foremost, I am always surprised when I plug something new into my computer when Windows starts to automatically install drivers, and in the case of this Akasa device I let out a small sigh of relief. While we do expect this from all products and devices, it is always the first huddle they have to overcome.

Once the device is installed we were pleased to see a few extra ‘removable drives’ appear in our Windows Explorer or My Computer. As we hadn’t plugged in any media yet, these were all greyed out, but were still visible. Interestingly there were only 4 of these drives, whereas there are 6 slots. At this point in time we looked at the list to try and work out which Memory Card brands would be coupled together, Secure Digital and microSD are clearly the same interface, giving us 5. While Memory Stick and M2 are both the same interface and as such this gave us the 4 different drives. It does however mean that you can’t plug in both an SD card and a microSD card at the same time for instance. A small drawback we thought.

We did test read/write times of the card reader and the speeds matched up exactly with what we would expect through any other card reader device, so the interface clearly works quickly and it is the memory cards that actually slow it down.

Coming to the extra addition of Bluetooth, which I never expect to work, we found that after a bit of time the drivers had been installed correctly, and given a bit more time the Bluetooth icon appeared in the devices and printers. From there we were able to set it up to work with both my phone and my laptop. We managed maybe more impressively to get my Nokia N8 phone to synchronise over Bluetooth everytime it came into range. However, unfortunately, as is with Bluetooth in general, the range is unbelievably rubbish and the transfer rates are shockingly slow. I know this is no fault of the Akasa card reader, but while it is a useful feature I really wish Bluetooth had been superseded with something much better.

There were however a few things I didn’t like about this device, and it was something very annoyingly fundamental, which is that it was in fact very hard to get the cards into the slots. This after some investigation, was a fault with a pre-retail sample and after seeing the latest retail batch we know that this has now been fixed (or more precisely our sample hadn’t passed through Quality Control) .