My little Nexus 7 has a tail.

It’s a USB 2.0 Female to Micro USB Male OTG On-The-Go Cable Adapter and it cost me a whopping 79 cents (shipping was free). I also bought a program called Nexus Media Importer (cost: $1.99). With these two, I can plug my Lexar 128 GB Backup Flash Drive  into the Nexus 7 to expand the memory to NINE TIMES the 16 gigs it has on board.

Now I can stream movies and music (not to mention carrying image files and other data) without rooting the device and without any hassle at all. It makes carrying extra information easy and makes accessing that information even easier when I’m on the go, or when I’m sitting at home and just want to stream a movie. Right now, I have 22 movies (.avi and .mp4 formats) on board the drive.

I use this thumb drive to keep a backup of all my ebooks (12 gigs worth!) and now I can carry my entire, verbose, ebook library with me wherever I go. The books are in a variety of formats, having been collected over many years, and I’m still trying to find the right app to be able to view THOSE on the nexus as well. Granted, the bulk of my collection of books is currently on Amazon’s servers… but I still have a slew that are “pre-amazon’ versions.

If/When I’ve vetted a flexible app for multiple ebook file formats, I’ll report that here. If any of you have an app that will read PDF, .lit, .epub and .mobi formats… let me know! (The .lit seems to be the hardest to find).

I’m finding that my Nexus 7 Tablet addiction is one of the biggest steps I’ve taken toward living in micro — after all, with a bluetooth mouse and a keyboard, I can do many of the things on it that I can do on my laptop. The addition of a mouse makes it better than my experience with the iPad, which required using a “touch” for the mouse function. What a hassle. It’s great if you WANT to touch, but it’s rough when writing… because you need to swipe, select, cut, paste, and put the cursor in a particular place… all of which is second nature with a mouse and keyboard shortcuts… but, not as elegant with my fat finger.

Without any extras, I can simply enjoy the clean lines and light weight of the tablet itself.

Anyway, the tiny pad is kinda awesome for scaling back the sheer bulk of my technology (especially what I carry around everywhere), and if you are trying to cut back, while keeping all the good stuff, you may want to check it out. Personally, I love it. 🙂