Best of What's New 2011

Computing

Seagate GoFlex Satellite

Watch your movies anywhere

Computing 6 of 8

Seagate GoFlex Satellite Seagate

The run-of-the-mill external hard drive isn’t particularly road-trip-friendly—it doesn’t work without a computer and can’t pipe movies to more than one person at a time. The 500-gigabyte GoFlex Satellite, on the other hand, facilitates mobile movie watching. An internal Wi-Fi radio broadcasts a hotspot that can serve up to three devices (iPads, smartphones, laptops) through a dedicated app or a Web browser. The drive accesses data quickly enough for each user to stream his own high-def movie, and an internal battery provides five hours of untethered viewing time. $200

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Tested

The Seagate GoFlex Satellite is a simple idea: take a big hard drive with you, wherever you want to go, that doesn't need any advanced setup, that doesn't need to be connected to a Wi-Fi network, and can beam your music, videos, photos, and documents to whatever device you happen to have with you--iPad, smartphone, laptop, whatever. And it does exactly that. Congratulations, iPad/smartphone/etc owner: You now have 500GB of extra storage, no matter which device you're using. Read more