Gadgetory

one of the biggest drawbacks of owning an iOS device is that you can't expand its storage you can use cloud services like iCloud or even Dropbox but those require an internet connection and without one they're useless today I'll show you an alternative way to add more storage to your iPhone iPad or iPod Touch these devices here are media hubs and when you have one set up it connects to your iOS device with a direct wireless connection letting you stream anything you have stored on the device so if you're on a long flight you can fit a number of movies and maybe even your entire music collection on this device and access it on your iPhone even when you don't have an internet connection when you're shopping around for a media hub you'll notice that a lot of them seem to pretty much do the same thing but keep an eye out for a few quirks for example the ravpower file hub and the i/o gear media share require an SD card that you purchased separately but the good news is that they tend to be a little cheaper they're also compatible with USB flash drives and they'll power your iDevice while you stream your media the other type of device you'll see is one with onboard storage like the Patriot Aero which comes with one terabyte and finally most of these guys can stream media to more than one device at the same time no matter which media have you decide to go with setting them up pretty much works the same way for the ravpower insert the SD card then connect it to your PC and fill it with any media you want to take with you for a long trip I'll add a few movies and my music collection at this point I'll turn on the file hub by long pressing the power button the wireless icon lights up and now I'll head back to the phone and connect to my file hub through the Wi-Fi settings menu now I'll launch the companion app and right under the device pane I should see all those files I just transferred to play media I'll just double tap and it'll start streaming pretty quickly too with the ravpower i can even transfer photos and videos from my iphone to the SD card which can be useful if you're on a trip and need to free up some space on your phone hopefully one day in future iterations of the iPhone Apple will let us expand storage using an SD card on the device but until then it's not about solution if you have any questions or tips of your own hit me up on Twitter and check out C Netcom slash how to for more tips like this for CNET I'm Sharon Profis