Disclosure: I have received information and products to facilitate this review. No other form of financial compensation was given and the opinions stated are my own.
The Seagate Wireless Plus is an external hard drive with built in Wi-Fi and it allows you to put a bunch of videos, music or whatever you want on it so you can stream it to your Wi-Fi capable devices. This sounds like a great idea, especially on long drives with kids in the car.
The idea is that the Seagate device, using the built in Wi-Fi it generates, streams movies, music or pictures multiple devices all at the same time. Essentially, one kid could be watching one movie while the other one watches a different one at the same time, streaming from one central device.
Installing the device is easy, you just plug it into a USB port on your PC and it’s done. But there is more to it, you have to go to the Seagate website to download the software needed for the PC to interact with the device. You will also need to download a free app for iphone. After setting everything up you are ready to play your movie, etc.
I was able to stream Iron Man 3, from my iTunes account on my PC, and also streamed Star Trek both mine and my wife’s iPhone’s and my son’s kid friendly Android tablet. The iTunes digital version of Iron Man 3 will not convert, that is an iTunes thing.
Getting the files onto the Seagate drive was easy, connecting to it from my phone was easy, getting through all the various formats (iPhone/iPad formats won’t work on Android) is where this drive falls short. Once it works, it works just fine and I was able to stream movies to two iPhone’s and an Android tablet at the same time.
Pros: When it works it is really, really nice, easy to install on both PC and portable device
Cons: File conversion software needed, and trial and error may be needed to get this working properly across different platforms, playback may pause at times due to Wi-Fi speed