Pogoplug Mobile

Amazon were out of stock when I was looking for one of these but I got one for the same price.

I did however order a Transend Class 10 32Gb SD card as I thought it would be cheapest to run with this and that 32Gb would be enough local storage.

Setup was indeed easy and the hardest job was getting out of the box :)

All one has to do is plug it into your home network (cat 5 cable provided), power it up and wait for the light on the front to go solid green.

The rest of the setup is done at the pogoplug website which finds the box with no user intervention or even entering a serial number (from what I can recall).

It does however offer you extra features and storage (see my uploaded screen dumps) and also offered is a PC backup program also at extra costs.

I went for the free service which gives you your local storage and the 5Gb online as two separate storage areas.

The PC Backup program can be installed which maps the local storage as a drive letter on your local network, typically P:

Thus you can just copy music, pictures or videos to P: (I have not tried videos).

The unit indexes the photos by month and year and also indexes music by title, artist, genre, etc.

Apps exist for IOS and Android platforms which let you play the music, and view the pictures and play videos (I have not tried videos), you can also do the same from the browser interface.

All of this does work on my local network and the apps were both able to find my pogoplug on my home network via the mobile phone network and wifi from another location (my router is a FritzBox 7270).

What I did have problems with are as follows.

1. My 32Gb SD card gave me incredibly slow performance saying it would take hours to copy a cd's worth of mp3 files. I changed the setup to a 16GB USB flash memory card which has worked with no problems.

2. The phone apps are supposed to auto upload to the pogoplug images and I guess video taken. I found this unreliable even when all devices were on the home network with the IOS version locking up it would seem on B&W images? Reported to support and even sent one of the images which caused the lockup but no solution that made any sense was offered.

The android version only seemed to upload the odd one and the only option the app offers is to try and upload all of them again by clearing the upload history.

It would also seem the device offers no power save option so I am not sure if a connected hard drive would spin down or run all the time.

I must say that once I realised the upload feature of the apps was suspect that I have not had to reset the pogoplug once.

Note: don't forget to eject the media before you unplug or you will have a long wait while it re-indexes the data.

At the end of the day, I am not sure the device offers any real value...

I've been using it for ages now and it is a great way of saving phone pics from the whole family.

Works great does all and more. Wish I had one sooner. Easy to set up and use? Looking at a second one for family members