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Seagate GoFlex Satellite wirelessly extends your iPhone's memory

You need what we all need? More space. That's where the Seagate GoFlex Satellite 500GB hard drive for iOS comes in.

Richard Trenholm Former Movie and TV Senior Editor
Richard Trenholm was CNET's film and TV editor, covering the big screen, small screen and streaming. A member of the Film Critic's Circle, he's covered technology and culture from London's tech scene to Europe's refugee camps to the Sundance film festival.
Expertise Films, TV, Movies, Television, Technology
Richard Trenholm
2 min read

You need what we all need? More space. More space to stretch our legs under cramped office tables; to pandiculate unabashedly beyond the confines of pokey bedrooms; to lope luxuriously past the boundaries of our modest plots. That, and have more space in the memory of our phones, which is where the Seagate GoFlex Satellite comes in.

The GoFlex Satellite is a 500GB portable hard drive with a difference: it packs a Wi-Fi module inside, allowing it to zap video and music to your phone without having to fill the phone's memory. It connects to the iPhone and iPad and other iOS devices, as well as Android and other Wi-Fi enabled gadgets.

The Satellite works by connecting to your phone or tablet via 802.11n Wi-Fi. You can then choose from the oodles of video or lashings of music stored on your hard drive and watch away to your heart's content without worrying about your phone's piffling memory or febrile data connection.

You can also use it to boost the catalogue of video on a device that doesn't connect to the Internet, such as the Wi-Fi-only iPad. And it can connect to up to three devices at a time, so you can have a movie party with your friends, or a silent disco, or something.

Seagate reckons it's "the first battery-powered external hard drive to wirelessly extend the storage capacity of any Wi-Fi enabled mobile device". We always take 'firsts' with a pinch of salt, but this is the first we've seen outside of a technology show. It's not the smallest hard drive in the world, but it's still portable enough for a pocket.

You can manage your library with a free GoFlex iPhone and iPad app. The GoFlex Media app resides on your mobile device, while the hard drive connects to your computer the same as any other hard drive, so you can simply drag and drop music, video and other files into the drive.

In the US, the GoFlex Satellite costs $200 (£125).Would you pay that much for more space?