First Look: Leyio Ultrawideband Sharing Device

What if you’re the only one with a Leyio?

If you haven’t got a friend with a Leyio – and right now most of us won’t – you can share using a USB cable connected to a computer. When you plug it in, it operates much like a Falsh drive, but only after it has been unlocked using the scanner. It also charges over USB.

You can also load data into your Leyio by plugging a USB drive into its USB socket.

Sharing data from the Leyio, you’re more likely to use the Shuttle which is a sensible concept. It’s 2Gbyte of storage, onto which you can load whichever file you want; you then plug it into a USB slot and transfer it. When you put it back into the Leyio, all the data on the Shuttle is copied off, and it’s wiped.

The whole idea is that, unlike USB sticks, the Shuttle doesn’t end up cluttered with old stuff you might not want to share, and the Leyio is protected by your thumbprint.

If you cut your thumb, you can register to the device using a pin number – you enter this by sliding your finger on the scanner.

The Leyio comes in a bosx with a deskstand, a USB cable and a web link to tools on the Leyio site.

Will it fly?

Unexpectedly, I warm to this. It’s well designed and comes with some nice marketing. It’s come from the investors and founders of the INS group, who also created the GPS company Kirrio, bought by Michelin.

It clearly does what it is supposed to do, but what it does – sharing files – is something that most of can do rather clumsily using existing methods. It’s also possible that Fast Bluetooth using Wi-Fi will emerge onto phones next year, giving the possibility of sharing (at a quarter the speed of a Leyio) from your main pocket device, without the need to carry another one.

It’s a fair bit bigger than a USB stick, and it doesn’t play media or handle telephony. What it does do is share files very smoothly and very conveniently. If that turns out to be something that enough people will pay £159 to do, it might succeed.