By: iPadfanzz staff on April 12, 2013
If you are thinking that you made a big mistake in buying a 16GB iPad model because it is not enough storage for all my apps, home videos, movies, TV shows, photos, and documents, then Seagate’s $200 Wireless Plus offers some peace-of-mind solution to it.
Seagate's new Wireless Plus portable harddrive has 1TB — which is almost double the size of its predecessor, for the same $200 price. It lets you stream to your iPad by creating its own Wi-Fi network. It's very useful, indeed!
Using the Wireless Plus with an iOS device requires the free Seagate Media app for iPad or iPhone. (An Android app is also available.) The app lets you easy access to the drive’s files, with both a Thumbnail and a List View, Genre along with Year views.
The harddrive requires no internet connection and supports up to three streams at a time and creates its own Wi-Fi network, so it works for regular internet browsing, too.
The Wireless Plus has a minimalist design as it is available in chrome-colored rectangular drive with USB 3.0. It has just a power button on the side and a green light which lets you know it's on and another one that blinks blue when its Wi-Fi is on.
It is easy to set up the Wireless Plus as you need to first download the app, and then connect your mobile or tablet to the drive's network, which shows up in your Wi-Fi settings. Getting your own content loaded is as easy as plugging the drive into your computer, and dragging files to the drive. USB 3.0 is insanely fast. It will take only few minutes to load up to 10GB worth of movies.
Wireless Plus is also compatible with Apple TV, and should have Samsung Smart TV support coming later this month.
According to Seagate, the device gives you 10 hours of continuous battery life, but streaming say a two-hour movie, in 1080p to the iPhone, will knock it down by roughly half.
However, the flaw with Wireless Plus is that a computer or mobile can connect to only one Wi-Fi signal at a time. This means the Wireless Plus can’t connect directly to Wi-Fi Internet when connected to the Wireless Plus. In addition, there is also no battery level gauge on its case, which would have been a convenient feature.
