I have to admit I have been keeping abreast of technology news with one eye, sort of, during this Holiday Season. I have a family, and my one child is going to grow up fast, so I’m told. Thus, I’ve been spending more time with him since he’s off from school for the winter break.
I was a little surprised, then, to see all the hoopla frothing around HP’s introduction Monday of a new Home Media Server for automatically backing up and accessing digital music, videos, photos and documents from multiple computers on a home network. “That sounds kind of familiar,” I thought.
But there it was, all over Gizmodo and Engadget and TUAW and I said to myself, “Has the Apple community been somehow missing this appliance and its amazements?”
To be fair, some of the reportage was done in the context of wondering if Apple itself might be coming out with a similar appliance, and whether or how it might be integrated with the company’s MobileMe web services product. And, wouldn’t you know it, there’s this trade show coming up next week in San Francisco, which would be a perfect time and place to introduce just such a device. The suspense is now killing me.
But this HP baby that got all the ink? Well, it’s compatible with Mac and Windows, organizes files across all PCs on a connected network, streams media across a home network and the Internet, has a server for iTunes that centralizes iTunes music libraries on the server for playback to any networked Mac or PC running iTunes, and costs $600 with a 750GB hard disk or $750 for one with a 1.5TB disk.
Sort of like a souped up version of the Lacie Home Media Server I reviewed six months ago for Mac|Life Magazine, priced at about $150 with a 500GB disk.
Also to be fair, HP’s server plays nice with Time Capsule and Leopard, and lets you easily publish pictures and video to social networks such as MySpace and YouTube – which is not to say Lacie has not updated its software to do the same in the past six months – but on the whole, HP’s latest venture outside its core printer making business struck me as something of the very slow-news-day variety.
Lonnie Lazar is a writer-musician-web designer-attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie’s photos on Flickr.
4 responses to “HP’s Home Media Server Makes Old News”
Yeah a PC buddy of mine has been running the software since the early beta days, and it’s working like a charm.
I have to admit as devout a Mac guy I am, I am looking hard at something like this for the home network if Apple doesn’t come across. That price point, with the tech is hard to beat.
I don’t see anything in that LaCie review of yours about Time Machine compatibility. That is huge.