Earlier this year, I got my hands on a Pogoplug. This small device aligns with my “personal cloud” theory by easily turning any USB drive into a hybrid device — data is available locally on the drive and remotely over the web. Today, Cloud Engines introduces the next-generation Pogoplug for $129, with availability in time for the holidays. This new version adds three more USB ports, bringing the total to four. That allows for the addition of multiple USB drives — traditional drives or flash memory-based — to your personal cloud. Along with easier sharing on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, the new features supported include:
- Automatically Synchronize Photos, Videos, Music and Other Selected Content – you can set Pogoplug to monitor drives for media so you don’t have to manually add the files. New content from iTunes, Windows Media Player and iPhoto is supported.
- Drag-and-Drop Music and Photo Slideshows – once you create a slide show with drag-and-drop, it’s easily sharable with anyone via the web, right through a browser.
- Easier Sharing with Pogoplug Address Book — after sharing your data with someone, Pogoplug remembers their contact information for future use, even if you remove the share.
- Global Search Across Multiple Drives and Pogoplugs — want to share data but you’re not sure which of your drives has it? Pogoplug can search all of them at one time. And if you have multiple Pogoplugs on the same account, it will even search across the devices.
- Organize Your Music, Photos and Videos — Music media is easier to browse with automatic displays sorted by album, artist and genre, complete with cover art. Video previews are shown live thumbnails.
- Play movies directly from my.pogoplug.com, or even to the iPhone — Video streaming from a Pogoplug is supported on most cameras, video cameras and mobile phones. You can also share movies for viewing over the web or with an iPhone.
All in all, this sounds like a solid step forward for the Pogoplug. Are there other options for these functions? Sure there are: Orb, Windows Home Server, various web storage and file synchronization services come to mind. But the ease of use and super-fast setup is what I found valuable in my testing of the original Pogoplug. It’s a product that doesn’t require any technical know-how of what’s going on — it simply works after the short setup. Pogoplug is now available for pre-order directly from Cloud Engines.
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