Gadgetory

no this is David with the verge and this is the Samsung optical Smart Hub it's an external optical disc drive that also streams content you can burn cds and dvds or just play things back and it works pretty seamlessly just like an internal drive would but on the other hand it can actually stream most of its contents so you can plug in any hard drive to the back of the device and stream its contents off of here through DLNA technology or you can use Wi-Fi and it connects directly to ios and android apps so you can easily find any files that you have saved to a USB drive and then you can stream it or actually download it to your device you can also send files in the other direction which is pretty cool you can back things up straight from the Samsung app on your phone or your tablet right to a USB Drive or you can actually burn them to a disc wirelessly it'll first back things up to a USB Drive and then burn a disc for you of whatever files you want but the really cool feature that it has is actually the ability to stream a DVD so you put the disc into the drive here in this case I have usual suspects and then you hit DVD player and it actually just starts streaming the DVD like it normally would and you get all of the options you get subtitles you get chapter select you get some of the extra features and it just works really really seamlessly the app itself is buggy it's a really early version but for the most part it gets the job done overall the optical Smart Hub does a number of cool things and the DVD streaming in particular is pretty awesome but the the interface and the setup are both so complicated and so difficult that it becomes really hard to use and especially at the price 129 99 you can just get a device like a pogoplug for the streaming that you want to do and get an external optical drive if that's what you need both of those will be a little simpler to use and probably perform better than this which tries to do everything and doesn't really succeed