First impressions are good, if a little larger than I had envisaged. Plenty of USB ports on the back to load up with drives and one on the front for quick access, perhaps best suited to a memory stick. The bright pink colour has drawn some interest too from the folks in the office.

Setting up seems simple, just plug and play. Hit upon a small snag here as the manual says plug in and visit activation webpage, activation page says don't proceed until both lights on the ethernet plug are glowing green. I had one green and one yellow flashing light. After 15 minutes and no change i looked up the troubleshooting guide for info. Checked the firewall and UDP information was all correct but still no joy. Anyone who knows me knows I have little patience for manuals and such like so I decided to brave it out and press proceed anyway. 

Connection found the device first time and took me thorough the security setup. May be worth a note on the manual or the online troubleshooting guide to say try it out anyhow. The unit does not seem to behaving any different than I would expect it to and the light on the port has continued to flash yellow.

Once security has been setup you can then access any USB harddrive connected to the unit from any web browser or iphone (free app download). I added a 4GB memory stick (pc format) and a 1TB (mac format) to the unit and logged in. The files are instantly accessible from the web browser and seem not to be affected by the different file formats or indeed wether the drives are pc or mac.

The files come up with generic icons to display the files immediately but seems to have a script running in the background to index the files and make thumbnails of them. Over time I could even preview the audio and video files in the file view without opening or downloading them. One small drawback, perhaps due to the browser limitations is the amount of files that can be displayed on any one screen at a time. Not a problem for small drives or memory sticks i assume, but the 1TB drive had well over 6000 files and could be painful trying to find something. I suppose if you are going to have the drive shared for any length of time it may be advisable to do some housekeeping and breaking things down into smaller folders etc...

After installing the iphone app and logging in I managed to easily look through the files on both disks, as well as stream music directly to the phone and watched 10 mins of a 1.5GB quicktime movie. Impressive.

All in all, first impressions of the unit are good. Will set it up as soon as we have established a base with a hardline connection and begin using it in anger. Hopefully it will prove an invaluable connection between the Heart of England and the Heart of Texas! 

More soon...