PROMISE APOLLO CLOUD 2 ANDROID

This device lacks the numerous activity LEDs that you get with most NAS units, but the power button's light ring will glow green when the drive is powered up and ready to use, white when it is in pairing mode, orange when it is updating its firmware or rebuilding its RAID drive, and red when there is a hardware failure. It has a glossy white finish with black trim, and there's a lone power button on the front. The Duo 2 is a small tower that stands 8.3 inches high and is 5.4 inches deep and 4.8 inches wide. The Apollo Cloud 2 Duo doesn't look like a typical NAS device, but neither did its predecessor, the Apollo ( at Amazon), which we reviewed back in 2016. The Apollo Cloud 2 Duo does offer some handy tools, though, including automatic camera roll backup to ensure the photos and video you take on your mobile device are never lost.

Offering a simple way to store and share photos and video from your phone, you get 8TB of storage, but it delivered middling file-transfer speeds in our testing. In those ecosystems, the Cloud 2 Duo looks heavy on cost and light on functionality.The Promise Apollo Cloud 2 Duo ($449) is an easy-to-use and easy-on-the-eyes network attached storage (NAS) device.

PROMISE APOLLO CLOUD 2 ANDROID

In its present form, this isn’t a flexible system where the user can easily bolt on new functionality as their needs evolve.įor PC and Android users, there are cheaper options available that can do everything the Apollo NAS can do, and so much more. However, that statement does assume that you’ll never outgrow those initial requirements. If you’re an Apple fan and want something simple that you can use to secure cloud data from your iPhones and iPads, along with Time Machine on your Mac, then the Apollo Cloud 2 Duo is perfectly specified. Equally, the Western Digital My Cloud Mirror is just £364 ($399 in the US) and offers a similar but more pliable platform. As we mentioned at the outset of this review, it will set you back around £499 ($449 in the US).įor less outlay Synology’s DS218j DiskStation and two 4TB NAS drives is an option, and it’s a solution that does significantly more than the Apollo Cloud 2 Duo. Most of the issues with the Cloud 2 Duo revolve around finding the balance between ease of use and providing long-term useful functionality.īut perhaps the biggest stumbling block that this product faces is pricing. We could go on, but the list of declined opportunities and missing features is excessively lengthy. There should have been two USB ports at least, and FAT32 (along with maybe ETX4 formatted) drives should have been accessible. And, on that subject, most NAS boxes support sharing printers on USB or connecting to a UPS, but neither of those is supported here. Amazingly FAT32 isn’t included, probably the most common format for memory cards and flash devices. The one (and only) USB port only works with NTFS, exFAT and HFS external storage devices. Sadly, cloud support isn’t the only feature that Promise tailored for very selective use. It doesn’t address the fact that many people use Dropbox, OneDrive, Amazon S3, Baidu Cloud, Box, Azure, HiDrive and a dozen other cloud services. Unfortunately, this only works on Android in the US, as that functionality is disabled beyond those geographic borders.Ĭreating Smart Albums by location (GPS tag) works, but there is no way to create or change tags in the viewing application should you wish to more accurately place them.Ĭompared with the Cloud Sync functionality that Synology has in its NAS boxes this solution is remarkably limited.

What it can do on iOS and Android is secure photos, videos, music and other known documents, ignoring all the other cloud data that falls outside those basic definitions.Ī selling point that Promise makes in its promotional material mentions how this device can automatically create Smart Albums based on using facial recognition tags that are applied by Apple and Google Cloud stored images.

Promise apollo cloud 2