I know what you’re thinking. From the pic
you see some sort of USB-device and from the name you’ve taken the word ‘pogo’
and you’re thinking ‘Here’s yet another lame USB gadget, ‘cept this one
apparently simulates hopping around on a pogo stick.’ Believe it or not though,
you’d be wrong. The Pogoplug in fact has next to nothing to do with that
finesse-sport known otherwise as ‘spring sticking.’ So, what does it do?
The Pogoplug is a streamlined method of
connecting a USB drive to the web for quick and easy file sharing. The smallish
white cube sports a USB port, an Ethernet port, and a power connection. Patch
in an ethernet cable and then jack-in your USB drive of choice for online
dissemination. Or interface it with a USB hub and connect multiple USB drives
for even more file-sharing fun. The Pogoplug supports drives formatted in NTFS,
FAT32, HFS+, and EXT-2/EXT-3.
Seems rather straight-forward, right? Well
manufacturers of so-called ‘straight forward’ products at times have a penchant
for muddling simple designs with complex interfaces and convoluted processes.
Thankfully, that’s not the case with the Pogoplug. In fact, this little cube is
the definition of streamlined. After making the aforementioned 3 cord
connection you simply logon to Pogoplug.com where you can upload/download and
view files. If you happen to be on the same local network the Pogoplug will deftly use
the more expedient means of file transfer, sending it over Ethernet rather than
routing it through the long way.
What’s more it’s all hip and cool because
it has an iPhone app! The free application allows users to stream music, files,
and PDFs over both Wi-Fi and 3G services. The service even manages to play-back tunes seamlessly; so if you find your iPhone over landen with artists A thorugh W, just load X, Y, and Z onto your jump drive and you’ll be jamming with Xavier Rudd in no time. You can even download files from the
device for storage on your iPhone.
Another more useful (though less cool) application
is that users can provide friends with custom access to the device by assigning their
email address as a unique login to the service. This would eliminate the arduous process of uploading files to file-sharing websites (many of which
enforce size and transfer limits), effectively
making our lives easier to live.
The price isn’t exactly negligible as the
Pogoplug will run you about $100. But there are no service fees and considering the quality of the streaming this may very well offset the price tag.
For those looking for a painless, streamlined way to send files over
the ‘net the Pogoplug will be well worth every cent.
