Review I must confess that I do have have an extraordinary fondness for network attached storage. And when terms like ‘home media’ and ‘cloud edition’ appear on the box, then it certainly gets my attention.
Cloud cover: Iomega’s Home Media Network drive
So, while for you Iomega’s latest storage box may be unnecessarily encumbered with the kind of moniker that would make even Fiona Apple think twice, to me it conveys it’s something that could be rather useful. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Sleek aluminium housings are all the rage with hard disk manufacturers, and Freecom’s Network Media Centre is no exception. Available in capacities from 1TB to 2TB, this single-disk Nas box promises to be your ultimate home media server thanks to the inclusion of UPNP/DLNA streaming support, an FTP server, a BitTorrent client and customisable multi-user work areas.
Freecom’s Network Media Centre: aesthetically unexciting
Aesthetically, the Network Media Centre isn’t overly exciting. Instead, it’s pleasantly simple with a smooth brushed-aluminium finish and glossy black faceplate framing a single status LED. Designed to sit horizontally, it’s inherently stable, with a reasonable footprint of 155 x 148mm and a height of only 43mm. Read the rest of this entry »
Review The fuss surrounding femtocells is hard to avoid, analyst Berg Insight reckons 70 million of the things will be in use by 2014, but Vodafone’s Access Gateway is the first femto product to hit the UK. It’s essentially an access point base station for mobiles, so if you want Vodafone coverage where there is none, then it’s hard to dispute that this product is the way to do it.
Vodafone’s Access Gateway
As it stands though, the industry will have to find a better business model before we’re all running our own base stations. The premise is a tiny base station that routes both incoming and outgoing calls over your own broadband connection. In doing so, it is effectively billing you twice for the bandwidth but, nevertheless, allows you to use a mobile phone in places where no signal reached before. Vodafone offers no discount on calls made over your femtocell, and data usage counts against your fair-use cap in the usual way.
The Access Gateway is also a 3G device, 2G handsets won’t be able to connect to it, or use its functions. It is built by Alcatel-Lucent using chips from picoChip and comes with an external PSU and an Ethernet cable. On the box are four LEDs, the top two indicate if the power is on and the internet connection is valid, the bottom then indicates if the femtocell has successfully connected to the Vodafone back end, while the one above shows activity. Read the rest of this entry »
Review For anyone technically minded and with time to spare, there are numerous network-attached storage (NAS) solutions available at low cost. However, there is a fast-growing market for the ‘appliance’ Nas that you plug in, switch on and use straight away on your home or small office network with a minimum of configuring. The d2 Network from LaCie tries its best to fit into this latter category and mostly pulls it off.
LaCie’s d2 Network
The d2 Network is built around a single hard disk in a compact (160x44x173mm) metal case weighing 1.5kg. We tested the 1TB model, although 500GB and 1.5TB versions are also available. In keeping with LaCie’s love of the sci-fi look to its product designs, the case of the d2 Network was created by Neil Poulton (www.neilpoulton.com) with a singular practical purpose in mind: the grooves on either side are intended to help dissipate heat from the device without the need for a fan. This is a cute marketing idea but single-disk external drives are usually fanless anyway because they tend not to generate enough heat to need one.
The d2 Network comes with a base stand for vertical positioning, if preferred. The manual indicates that you can also simply rest the drive flat on one side, or rack-mounted with other d2 drives, although it is not clear how this might affect the purported heat-sink action of the ribbed casing. Read the rest of this entry »
