Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Bit torrent is great for sharing stuff. But it consumes too much electricity if your powerful desktop machine just runs the whole day for downloading stuff. So I am looking for something more energy efficient.
I was attracted to the ezdownloader from another maker. But it price tag was a little high and I guess there must be a competitor out there with a better price/feature ratio. So I researched the US Market and then the TW and HK market. There are definitely similar products with much cheaper price. Finally I came to this one - the Sapido 3G N+ Wireless Audio/Video Router.
What this is:
- A wireless router - that serve as any other router out there, you may just hook it up to a DSL/cable modem to get wifi at your home/office.
- A NAT server - you may attach a USB drive to it and access the drive as as SAMBA network drive. The drive can be format to NTFS. I believe the limit is 1.5TB. I am using only a 250GB so it is good enough for me.
- Webcam server - I haven't tested this feature yet. As the spec indicates, you should be able to plug in a webcam and access it from a webpage. It sounds fun, isn't it?
- Finally, the most important factor - A BT downloader. You access this router via a webpage interface, upload the .torrent file, and it will download the contents for you! It allows a list of 20 torrents, with 2 active download running. Unlike the ezdownloader, where you must use the vendor's website to control the download, this router will be access from the LAN only. Depends on how your LAN gateway is set up, you can assign this router as your Web server at your current IP. If you do that, then you may access the router from outside (anywhere over the world).
The set up was not straight forward for non-geeky users. But just be patient and you should be done in 30 minutes. There is no manual provided - only a big folded piece of the instruction paper with diagrams. Since my broadband gateway is already wireless, I use this a wireless Access Point. Yes, you can use this a wireless "client" to your existing wireless network. Then itself can be used as a wired + wireless access point. There are four ethernet ports available to use. I hook my PS3 and XBOX to it and it works great!
The samba network drive can be detected by the PS3 automatically. I am able to watch the movies directly from the PS3 without doing anything extra.
The Pros:
- A lot of feature to play with.
- Wireless AP (the 3G network feature is not tested, but could be a big plus to someone)
- Support BT
- Support Samba
- Upgradable firmware
- Web access from outsideThe Cons:
- BT page not compatible completely with all web-browsers. It likes Firefox and IE more.
- Can't handle Asian character sets - all characters of the downloading file name will be converted to hex byte representation of the character. It makes reading back of the file name difficult sometimes. Not a problem if the file was created before hand and copied to the USB drive.
- The saved path sometimes can not be handled by Windows explorer, if you plug the USB drive to your PC. However, you may use a ftp client to ftp to the router and access the drive to rename the files before moving back to Windows.
=> It definitely can do some improvement on the file system.
Conclusion: overall this product is great product of integrated features. However, I did spend some effort finding it. I think the sales department from Sapido should promote it a little better so a bigger consumer crowd can see its availability.
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