No, not the latest rumor fromMacdom, but the first wireless NAS I can really recommend. I've tried a few of these things before -- Western digital, but that was limited to either memory cards or SSD drives (expensive for storage capacity) the last attempt from Seagate, the go-flex satellite (never liked that one felt it was buggy, didn't work too long on a battery charge and never worked quite right with VoiceOver.
What I recently got and have been playing with in the past few days is the replacement for the go-flex Satellite -- The Seagate Wireless Plus. This one has worked flawlessly from the start and was a piece of cake to connect to the iPad and to the internet. It's in a slim, very basic pacckage with the status lights on top and a snap off rear panel that you remove when you plug in the I/O adaptor/charger interface. Charges from totally drained to full charge in 3 hours when plugged into the included wall wart and then runs for approxf 10 hours depending on usage.
The device can wirelessly stream HD movies to 4 people simultaneously, and up to 8 folks can share music and documents at the same time. For setup and control you can use either a web browser (haven't tried that yet) or the Seagate IOS app, which I downloaded before buying the drive to see how well it worked with VoiceOver, and it looked reasonably good so I bought the drive.
A couple of caveats:
You must download the content when connected to a computer using a usb cable (usb 3.0 is fully supported.
The disc's format is NTFS, but there is a utility on the drive itself that installs on your mac computer so the files transfer in the correct format.
You do need the dock connector to charge and transfer files from the computer
You can move data (or stream it) from the drive to your IOS device, but you can't write back to the disc via wireless. This doesn't seem to be a real liability and one can understand this given security requirements.
Not too bad.
Oh yes, also works with Android devices but I don't have any of those to try.
So, for a test I loaded a 24/96 ALAC file onto the machine and played it through the native music player on the iPad into my ALO International and then through a custom balanced (RSA to TRRS) cable to my HiFiMAN RE-600 IEMs and wow, a symphony in my head. BTW, I think the HiFiMAN RE-600s are one of the great and underappreciated IEMs out there. They are very, very good not even considering their $400 price tag.
Anyway, I still have lots to do and learn with this machine -- I'd like to enable DLNA and try playing back music with 8player on the iPad. (that will also stream to other DLNA devices such as certain video players, etc.)
All in all, this completes my bedroom and mobile headphone system and should let me take along just about my entire music collection.
-- Jim
ed)
