One of the limitations of buying a tablet is you won't get anywhere near the amount of storage as a laptop. There's SD cards for carrying extra movies or music with you, but having it all stored on an external USB hard drive would be so much simpler, not too mention give you much more room.
For iPad owners, this is compounded by the fact the Apple device isn't designed to let you plug in an external USB drive anyway.
Enter the wireless hard drive. Rather than limit yourself to your tablet's internal 16Gb, 32GB or 64GB, the Seagate GoFlex Satellite gives you 500GB of space for music, movies and whatever else you want to carry around with you.
The GoFlex gets around the iPad's lack of USB by having its own battery powered 802.11n WiFi connection. Turn the device on, leave it sitting on a nearby table, and you'll be able to watch and listen to movies and music on the iPad you're holding.
The GoFlex Satellite: streams HD video, though not the transcoding silver bullet.
There's an app for Android and iOS, but Seagate says the device will work with most WiFi devices - you access it through your web browser. This means you can also use it for phones and laptops too. If you usually carry a tablet and phone, and maybe even a laptop with you, this little box will can stream to all three at the same time.
We can think of a few potential ways this might be handy. For one, you'll be able to take your entire music library with you. A supply of movies would make this a handy companion on long trips.
It doesn't entirely solve the iPad's storage issue though. For one, you can't use it as a backup device for your iPad. The GoFlex Satellite is designed to stream or download to the iPad, not in the other direction.
And for all those people wanting to play the myriad of file types downloaded from BitTorrent on their iPad, the GoFlex doesn't mysteriously transcode everything. You can stick whatever files you want on the device, but to play them, that's dependant on what your device supports.
Also keep in mind that the GoFlex Satellite essentially takes over your WiFi connection until you've finished using it - so you can't stream movies and browse the Internet via WiFi at the same time.
Still, that might be a tradeoff some people are willing to make, if it means not paying for 3G data rates to access data when they're on the road.
At $219 the GoFlex Satellite isn't particularly cheap when you compare it with the same capacity non-wireless hard drives, not to mention NAS boxes. You can't take a NAS on the road with you though. To get the real value from this, you'll want to be actually using it while out and about.
Seagate claims that the GoFlex Satellite's rechargeable battery will last for five hours.
Another option is to use Apple's iCloud service, which will arrive with iOS 5 soon. With iCloud, the upside is you won't need to carry around yet another gadget. On the downside, you'll be dependant on 3G reception, the data will come out of your monthly allowance, and for 55GB it will cost you $105 a year.
