Opinions: Life with Leyio

I've been carrying the Leyio Personal Sharing Device (PSD) with me pretty much everywhere since writing about it a few of weeks ago. I show it to anyone that I think would be interested. Once I've explained its approach to offline sharing and what I think Leyio aims to add to that experience, I'm often given feedback and a few suggestions as to what might be improved upon.

Empathy with Leyio PSD seems to be quite easily reached, and most people appreciate the big picture - this device has USB incorporated in the best ways possible, and then brings Ultra Wide Band (UWB) to the table for us to start considering as a competitor to Bluetooth and other wireless sharing protocols. UWB would attract more users to the PSD if there were other devices that made use of it. Transfers are so fast and use so little power that this becoming a reality can't be too far off, can it?

Compliments that the Leyio receives include how easy on the eye its curves are, how the fingerprint scanner performs so well at being a quick way of securely gaining entry and then quite intuitive for navigating the menus, and how impressively long the battery lasts. Most of my student friends asked - "Where do you plug in headphones?" - and I think that question speaks volumes (pardon the extremely bad pun). I really hope this technology finds its way into my phone and/or MP3 player, or that future products of Leyio include whatever is needed for listening to music.

Although the Leyio PSD is aimed at offline file sharing, away from access to a computer, it makes the perfect companion for a netbook. I use an Asus EeePC 701 running Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which instantly recognises the PSD as a USB device and gives me extra storage capacity. I'm able to organise received files from my EeePC, moving them out of the PSD's inbox and into the relevant file type folders - Documents, Photos, Videos etc. Files arrive in the device's inbox if anything is stored on the 2GB USB "shuttle" when it is docked with the PSD, or if someone else "flicks" to share files using UWB from another Leyio.

But if there was more that could be done with files stored on the PSD through the onboard software then I wouldn't need to visit a computer nearly as often. An application that automagically sorts files in my device's inbox by file type and places them in the relevant folders would be really helpful. The ability to manually move files into folders, but more importantly, to be able to select multiple files for simultaneous movement and sharing would definitely be useful.

I would like the Leyio website to grow an App Store. A platform or API that outside developers can write apps for is fast becoming a common strategy, but it's quite a challenge to get the first handful of developers interested. Leyio's website already has Java enabled so the page will sync social networking profiles and avatars to the device. I'm going to be watching my Account page very closely to see what applications come next.

Make something fun! Games that make use of the flick to share gesturing could prove challenging to build, but if something like Wii Tennis could be added, I'm sure that would boost Leyio's popularity. Leyio's English Community blog has a post about Project Natal, so at least they're thinking about games.

All in all, the Leyio PSD has had a great reception. There is just one problem though - price. Almost without exception, the high price of the Leyio pushes people towards saying they wouldn't buy one. 16GB USB flash drives can be bought for as low as £25. UWB can't be justification for all the extra cost, because no other devices are commercially available that will also connect with the Leyio PSD, so future releases need to be more competitively priced.