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Look Ma, no wires: Seagate’s new Hard Drive for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch

Look Ma, no wires: Seagate’s new Hard Drive for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch

Hard drive-manufacturer Seagate today unveils a first–a wireless hard drive with a built-in personal Wifi network for iOS devices–Apple’s iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. The idea is that since the Apple devices don’t have expandable memory or slots to allow in external hard drives, heres a way to greatly extend their use. The Seagate GoFlex Satellite drive is 500 Gigabytes and sells for $199.99, at the Seagate, Amazon and Best Buy websites. It will extend to Best Buy’s retail stores in July, and be available for Android phones in the summer.

The drive is being targeted to movie lovers–on the box, Seagate doesn’t tout the 500 GB, but instead promises storage for up to 300 movies.

“Movies are what’s driving storage capacity for us these days,” says Greg Falgiano, a senior product manager for Seagate. “And our main focus right now with this product is the iPad. Apple devices have the most difficult time with upgrading and storage.”

Apple famously doesn’t have a USB slot to accept hard drives on its mobile devices. So how do you transfer movies, photos and music from the drive to the iPad? Via Wifi. You go into the system settings and look for the GoFlex personal Wifi network, which works even without a WiFi Internet signal. Then the iPad and the drive can talk to one another.

Media can be accessed through the browser, or via Seagate’s new GoFlex Media app, which is currently available in the iTunes store.

Tip: Movies must be encoded in the file format Apple prefers for iPad, iPhone and iPod playback–.M4V and .Mov. If you transfer your personal video, be sure to put them into iTunes, click the Advanced tab, and convert for Iphone or iPad format.

We spent some time with the drive and shot a Talking Tech video to show how it works. The video will be posted later Monday.

[Thanks: http://content.usatoday.com/]

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