I recently received my Pogoplug, and after putting it through the paces for a few days of real-world use here’s my review:

First, it’s slick, quick, and awesome… for some things. The packaging is very Apple-esque, so much so that they don’t include instructions (three step process they print on the box itself). The device is a small brick that plugs directly into your electrical outlet (or through an included extension cable, a la Apple Magsafe power adapters), and then plugs into a USB hard drive (or USB hub for more than one hard drive) and an ethernet cable on your network cable. It may seem odd these days to plug anything in over ethernet, but it seems to work well, and you don’t need the Pogoplug to be anywhere visible or accessible. Setup is wickedly simple. They even give you videos on the site in case you can’t figure out “plug USB hard drive into Pogoplug”. Then magically, it’s up and going.

Second, the things Pogoplug works well for. Pogoplug is very good for turning any USB hard drive into a NAT device, and a NAT available across the Internet even. It’s smart enough to understand when you are connected on the local network, so transfering data within your network keeps it local (and thus fast), rather than shipping it across the Internet and back. Transfering data across the Internet works very well, although it is only as quick as your upload and download speeds. If you install the Pogoplug application you can turn your connected hard drives into local drives (either as a single drive or multiple drives, depending on your preference, and availability of multiple drives). You can even set certain drives or folders to share with people, an awesome feature that works exactly as advertised (you’ll notice that the images in this post are actually being served by my Pogoplug!). You manage your Pogoplug on the my.pogoplug website, which also offers web access to your drives. There is a free, and pretty awesome, iPhone application that gives you access to all of your data and can view/play any of it (in formats that the iPhone can play natively).

Third, the limitations. I was hoping to be able to access all of my 300GB of music across the Internet. Technically, this is possible. At work I can browse each folder and play a single song. I can do the same on the website. I can even import the music into a jukebox player like Songbird, but then Songbird is unable to play the music (presumably due to slower than expected access times). So, navigating a huge iTunes-organized music library is basically impossible. Worse still, the awesome iPhone application doesn’t seem to be able to display more than the first 50 or so folders in my iTunes directory, so even if I wanted to browse through the thousands of folders and find a particular song to play I wouldn’t be able to.

In sum, it’s a great way to turn a USB hard drive into an Internet-accessible NAT drive, but don’t expect to suddenly have all of your high-fidelity data ready for playing and manipulation. The price seems reasonable enough at $100 but their shipping to Canada is an additional $50, which makes the device a lot less worth the cost. Still, I’m happy if not entirely overwhelmed about the Pogoplug. I’m hoping that software updates may improve some of the media access, and then I’ll have nothing but amazing things to say about the Pogoplug.