HooToo TripMate Elite

HooToo TripMate Elite is $60 at amazon though I picked it up while it was on sale at newegg for $46.

Personal cloud storage devices have recently become more popular lately which usually let you provide your own usb storage and share it among your mobile devices over wifi.  I picked up one of the first on the market called cloudftp (it's now called iUSBPort) through kickstarter.  It's served me well on many trips over the years.  I also find it handy to bring a travel router like my TP-LINK TL-WR702N.  It was getting a bit of a hassle having to bring 2 devices + power adapters + having to switch between wifi networks to have either personal cloud access or internet access (setting up cloudftp in infrastructure mode is a bit of a pain), and the relatively short battery life of cloudftp.  In comes this new device that pretty much does everything above for less in a much more compact and portable form factor.

The HooToo Covers all these functions:
- Personal cloud usb storage (worked fine with ntfs usb 3.0 flash drive and a 1TB exFAT 2.5" external hard drive)
- Travel Router, 150mbps b/g/n, AP/Router/Bridge
- 6000mah battery that powers itself or can charge other devices.
- Dual USB wall charger when plugged in with the handy built in ac plug that folds down.
- Works while charging either while plugged in or over the micro usb port.  So say if you wanted to use it on a long trip you could plug the HooToo into a car power adapter or another external battery (like this RAVPower one that I really like) and run the personal cloud all day.
- the HooToo app is ok (and free) but nPlayer is the absolute best for streaming/playing back media supporting a ton of codecs and protocols and works great with the HooToo.

Out of the box it was already flashed to the latest firmware.  Setup was pretty easy.  I tried it out in router and bridge modes and both worked fine.  What was nice was the mobile apps found the hootoo just fine even when I was connected to my home router vs the hootoo directly.  It's good then that any access to the device/personal cloud requires the web login.

ip: 10.10.10.254
default wifi pw: 11111111 (8 x 1)
default web login/app login/samba share: admin/no pw

Performance seemed fine for a travel router in an environment where I'm already running two powerful routers with transmit power jacked up.  It's good enough for streaming media.  I tried out the iOS (on iPhone and iPad), android (nexus 7 2013), and my acer c720 chromebook (crouton, xbmc, streamed over samba shares).  All seemed to work pretty well and I had 3 streams going at once.  The mobile apps worked just fine.

Highly Recommended.  It's a great value for all the functionality it provides.  It has a very small and light weight travel friendly form factor.  It seems pretty stable overall in my limited testing so far.  Each function might not be quite as feature rich as the devices I'm replacing but it hits pretty much every use case I care about.