Iomega's iConnect managed to launch during the whirlwind that was CES 2010, so if you didn't quite catch it the first go 'round, here's hoping that you're paying attention today. In essence, the device is fairly simple. It's a small, port-filled slab that's designed to sit beneath or beside your current router or hub, and while we're certainly dumbing things down somewhat with this description, it's basically a variant of the Pogoplug. Equipped with four USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet jack and an internal 802.11b/g/n WiFi module, the iConnect is designed to put your existing thumb drives, external hard drives and / or printers online. We've had less-than-awesome experiences in the past with devices that turn localized storage into network accessible storage, so we went into this overview with fairly low expectations. Much to our surprise, we came away duly impressed with the package that Iomega has assembled, so be sure to read on if this one has been sitting on your maybe-must-have list.

Update: After a couple of months of use, we ran across some pretty intense issues with this device. Eventually, none of the PCs and Macs in our house would print to the networked printer, and our USB hard drives would only show up sporadically. Needless to say, our enthusiasm has been significantly tempered, and we wouldn't recommend this for homes where mixed platforms reside.


View Gallery:Iomega iConnect unboxing and hands-on



We unboxed the iConnect with a few goals in mind. For starters, we wanted to get our ancient USB-based HP printer online, enabling us to send print commands from a variety of computers (Macs and PCs) and