We've become pretty wary of featuring Kickstarter projects here on Android Police - too many have overpromised, under-delivered, or just delayed themselves into oblivion. (I'm looking at you, Star Command.) But this one has too much potential to ignore. A pair of San Mateo engineers have created a MicroSD card reader that plugs right into a MicroUSB port, making it a perfect travel companion for phones or tablets with no expandable storage. The project has been successfully funded after just three days.

There's a lot to like about this Kickstarter. One, the hardware is incredibly simple, but well thought-out: the housing is a tiny dongle that hangs off of a device's USB port, just far enough to enclose the SD card itself. A blue LED indicator light shows that it's working. Once inserted, the card becomes accessible to Android as mounted storage, as if it the reader was part of the device itself. It works with standard cards up to 32GB, and SDXC cards with a theoretical limit of a whopping 2 terabytes. The reader has been tested on the major current hardware from Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and a few others, with no problems. The design includes a handy keychain-mountable cap which would let you travel with the reader.

It's not perfect. Strangely, Nexus hardware (Galaxy Nexus, N7, N10) seems to have some difficulty, and third-party apps or root are necessary to get everything working. The Nexus 4, and other hardware that doesn't support USB-OTG, is just incompatible. The Kickstarter team is quite upfront with these limitations - see the link below for a full list of issues. There's also no definite timeframe for release, though the estimated times put it at about 3-4 months after the end of the Kickstarter project in early May.

On the other hand, the project initially asked for just $5000 - a tiny, frugal amount compared to some Kickstarter goals - and the $1 pledge is named "Thanks for all the fish." These guys are hoopy froods who know where their towels are.

Mini MicroSD Reader for Android Smartphones & Tablets