I am a gadget geek. I admit it. However, this combined with my perpetual, insatiable appetite for anything new and shiny makes it almost impossible for anyone to purchase me a gift with buttons (except for clothes). That’s why I was really impressed and excited after I opened my gift from my dad and mom this past Christmas. It was shiny and new and had buttons and better yet — I did not own it. It was the Seagate FlexDrive. You can check out the details on their website, but it’s basically a Wi-Fi enabled hard drive with software. The latter makes it extremely usefully for those of us that have a mountain of music, podcast and video content that wish to stream to devices WITHOUT the need of an Internet connection. Even better it supports iTunes related content. That means up to three (current limitation – mostly due to the PHY/ link layer) users can stream content from the Seagate FlexDrive. So when can you use something like this? When ever you are away from home and/or don’t have an Internet connection to stream content. This means in the car (not the driver), airplane (when they officially allow it), on holiday (at the hotel, at the coffee shop, etc.), on business travel (bring your library for those nights you are battling jetlag), or even at home (when the kids want to watch something different.
It’s a breeze to setup: (1) Buy the drive and copy over the content you want to stream, (2) download the app for your devices (if you want iTunes content streamable make sure you device is linked to your library), and (3) enjoy your content. There is an internal battery that lasts approximately ~4 hours so you don’t need a connected power source.
So things to keep in mind:
- Link your iDevices to your iTunes library otherwise the DRM content won’t play.
- You can only stream to up three devices at a time (of course you can have n devices with the app)
- Works well with iPods, iPads and iPhones.
It’s a great add-on to any media library.
