One of the problems with the original iPad and its successor the iPad 2 was the omission of a memory card slot for importing photos/videos.
In order to import photos/videos to the device you had to physically take a snap shot/video with your camera, then either plug your camera or SD card into your computer and then plug in your iPad and transfer the content over via iTunes.
Things have gotten easier with the new wireless iCloud integration, but the whole process is still pretty long winded! But fear not there is a solution - which costs next to nothing from eBay - in the form of a Connection Kit.
The latter is designed for both the iPad and iPad 2 (well on paper that is, more on this later) and it provides both an SD card and USB port so you can plug in your SD card or digital camera directly into your iPad/iPad 2 and then import the images into the tablets Photo software.
Additionally you can use the USB port to plug in a USB keyboard or we even found that the latter can be used to charge up your smartphone by draining the charge from the iPad itself.
Design and installation
In terms of design the Connection Kit is made from a lower quality plastic, but for less than £4 it is still pretty good. However we did get our Connection Kit from eBay and the image on the box did not match the device we had in the hand. At the base of the kit there is a small switch that you can slide across to select either your SD card slot or USB port. Plugging the device into our iPad 2 was a tight fit, so you need to wiggle this into place, but at least it fitted our iPad 2’s STM case without the need to remove it.
When the device and the SD card is inserted a small red led light will appear to show you that it's working. The iPad 2 will then switch to the Photo software and start to display the contents of the SD card in a small thumbnail format.
You can then select which photos/videos you want to import. Once imported it will also ask if your want to remove the original(s) from the SD card. All photos are then displayed in the Imported Album library.
Speed wise the process is pretty quick, even from our 6MP photos. But sometimes we found you have to repeat the import process in order to get larger amounts of files to import over.
USB
The USB port was not so effective on our iPad 2 either, as it would not work with our Fujitsu camera, nor would it import from our Samsungs mass storage mode. Leaving the device in for to long (in USB mode with the smartphone connected) would also prompt the iPad 2 to display a message on the screen saying that the camera Connection Kit is not supported. We then head to shut down the iPad 2 and reboot it.
You can however plug a USB keyboard into the device to aid typing, but again we were getting a prompt saying that the device was not supported. Thankfully you can click "OK" to bypass the message and the keyboard still works (but it still kept displaying the message every few minutes which got annoying).
So for iPad 2 owners the connection kit is less useful, but the SD card part works well enough to warrant the small investment. Mind you as we mentioned above we did get our device from eBay and there is no guarantee that the product you get will be the same as ours (as they vary from supplier to supplier), so you may have better luck with the USB port.
Supported Formats that the iPad can handle
Jpeg, Tiff, Gif, MP4 and MOV format
