The new Hitachi Mobile LifeStudio Plus for PC or Mac has three innovative features that enliven the mundane world of portable external hard drives.
First, it comes with a “wow” software program that organizes all your photos, videos and documents onto a scrollable 3-D wall. Second, it can back up your data to an online “cloud” server for guaranteed retrieval in case your hard drive fails.
And third, it comes with a detachable USB flash drive that synchs, or updates, your various files when you reconnect it to an included docking station.
The Cooliris-made software is only available with this drive, but once it installs it works on all your drives. While you wait, the program automatically searches and organizes all of the videos, photos, music and documents on your computer and puts them into large 3-D thumbnails that you can view by moving along a digital wall.
Once the software loads up, you may forget that this product is geared to storage and backup. The 3-D wall is very cool to look at and use, with thumbnail files automatically sorted by date. Mac users have something similar in the Cover Flow program for the iPad. But for PC users such as myself, the software is an eye popper on the Windows 7 desktop.
The LifeStudio software interface is easy to use, with all options on a Channel bar on the left of the screen.
I clicked on the “My Life” tab and on “Videos,” and up came a wall of thumbnails. I clicked on one of my video files, and it played flawlessly with Windows Media Player. I then clicked on one of my “Album” thumbnails and it played the songs in order, even as I switched gears and clicked on a document thumbnail, which opened up an old column in my word-processing software.
It’s a slick and seductive way to get around and access files on your computer. Everything runs seamlessly from the software. It’s a real pleasure to see your digital mess so well organized and at your fingertips. No more combing through dull lists of files to find what you want.
But there’s more. Click on the “My Social” tab and you can log in to your Facebook account. I was easily able to post a photo to my Facebook page and also downloaded a photo album from a friend’s page.
You can also click on “News” and find a selection of CBS headline video clips on the stories of the day or click on “In-Depth” and watch full episodes of recent programs such as “48 Hours.”
Under the “Television” tab, full episodes of TV series are available for free viewing via Hulu, which play on Adobe Flash, along with ads.
You can also play casual games from an included selection, easily search for YouTube videos or upload photos on Flickr and Picasa.
But let’s get back to basics. The LifeStudio Plus is a “USB 2” portable external hard drive that offers anywhere from 250 gigabytes to 2 terabytes of storage depending on the model, ranging in price from $79.95 to $199.95.
It comes with a docking station on whose front sits a 4-gigabyte removable flash drive that lets you take the files you need on the go. If you work on a document on another computer and save it to the flash drive, the updates will automatically sync the new file on your host computer when you reattach the key disk to the docking station.
As for backup, you have several choices with the included backup software. You can back up locally to the main Hitachi drive itself or you can send your files to a cloud server managed by a third-party vendor.
When you sign up with Hitachi, you receive 3 gigabytes of free cloud storage. Once I signed up, I backed up my Herald business stories from the past few years to an online cloud. I doubt I’ll ever use the files again, but if I do, they’re easy to retrieve.
If you need more than 3 gigabytes of online storage, you can sign up for 250 gigabytes for $49 a year.
All in all, I have a bunch of external hard drives that work well, but this is the first one that ever generated any excitement. Hitachi is onto something here.
Storage is boring, but when you add a cool interface that organizes your files into “eye candy” thumbnails and adds easy access to a bunch of Web content, it makes computing more interesting. And as for the cloud backup, well my articles are really “out there” now.
Source:http://news.bostonherald.com/jobfind/news/technology/view.bg?articleid=1279450&format=&page=2&listingType=jftech#articleFull
