Just got in a pretty cool little gadget that has quite a few practical uses you guys might be interested in.
This RAVPower device is about the size roughly of a Western Digital My Passport hard drive, (slightly longer, about 33% thinner), pretty darn light, has an SD card slot, a full size USB port for connecting any kind of USB storage to it (pen drives, or even a portable hard drive, which can even be powered from this RAVPower device like a Western Digital My Passport drive).
Basically, any storage device or SD card you plug in gets served up as a file share via wifi. You can plug both an SD card and USB storage device simultaneously as well, providing access to both. You can access it like a CIFS share, via web portal, and also via a RavPower Filehub app freely available for IOS and Android. Up to 5 concurrent sessions are supported. The app also allows data management such as file copy between devices and folders, moves, and deletions.
For wifi access, you can connect this to a wifi network (b/g/n wifi support with WPA/WPA2 PSK or open), or it can do its own wifi network you can connect to instead if you need to access the data but cannot connect to an external wifi network, but this of course knocks you off the internet. If it has connectivity to a wifi network you saved in its config, it’ll connect to that automatically, but the isolated network is always up, ready to go.
Another handy feature is the web portal via an IOS device can open up video files to stream unprotected content, I would assume android devices could use this or another method. I can’t seem to get any protected files to playback though from it via IOS.
Finally, you can connect this to your computer via USB, power it off, and it becomes a regular SD card reader.
Lots of useful scenarios with this…
· Move/backup data on camera SD card by inserting the camera’s SD card into it, and your choice of USB storage (device itself has a single SD card slot, keep that in mind) – I did try to hook my wife’s Fujifilm camera up to it via the USB port, but it didn’t recognize the camera’s inserted SD card unfortunately, so pretty good chance you’d need a USB hard drive or stick as the copy location. It does claim that many cameras would work in this manner, though.
· Share data with multiple people quickly instead of doing the ol’ USB stick pass along (5 people can connect at once)
· Afraid to go to a meeting with just a tablet or smartphone in case you need to get some data from someone who might have data on a USB stick, or need to give them data? Use the app to copy to/from USB stick and the SD card within the device or vice versa. Or they can connect to it wirelessly and dump the data.
· External unprotected movie/music/reading material repository for your family on a road trip
It also serves as a 3000mAh phone power bank for emergency power, and is powered/charged via USB, so you can keep it powered in the car for that road trip with a simple micro-USB car charger, or power it via another power bank if you’re camping or something.
Easy to use (web portal for heavier management, firmware updates, etc), lots of flexibility.
About the only thing I don’t like? You must authenticate with the admin account of the device to access the CIFS share; there’s no way natively I can tell to create limited users who have say read only rights, or even file share access rights. And admin has full rights, so don’t put your only copy of data on the thing, and might be smart to virus scan it when you’re done sharing it with other people. I even tried to Putty into it to see if I could create new accounts that way, and no dice, so I’d probably have to root it (no thanks).