Lenovo Beacon Home Cloud Center Shown Off At CES

Personal cloud storage is one of the major highlights of this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, with companies both big and small elbowing each other for the media sharing spotlight. The newest contender is Lenovo, which pulled the curtains back on a fashionable external hard drive dubbed the Lenovo Beacon Home Cloud Center.

As the name implies, the device is a wireless storage hub that enables users to store and access files and media without having to manually transfer any data from their devices. It runs Linux on a dual-core Intel Atom processor and includes 1GB of DDR3 memory, with a maximum capacity of 6 terabytes in a two-drive configuration.

“You can think of it as a home server, everything you’d expect from your home server now, but it’s also your home cloud,” Lenovo’s Stephen Miller detailed in an interview. “This is connected to the internet, so as soon as you take the photograph, it’s gonna sync … as soon as you start walking in the house, all the photographs are gonna start syncing.”

The Beacon is Lenovo’s arguably most impressive cloud storage solution to date, sporting a sleek accordion look with a built-in 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi adapter, support for Bluetooth 4.01 and HDMI output for streaming content to your TV. There’s also a gigabit ethernet port and USB 3.0 port, which makes it even more convenient to load media. It will become available in April for $199, but the price doesn’t include hard drives.

Perhaps most important, the Beacon comes with a companion remote control application that lets users set access permissions and manage files from their Android devices. A similar application is available with Lyve Home, a rivaling NAS product developed by Lyve Minds. But unlike Lenovo, the newly launched startup is taking a more software-centric approach to storage that involves turning the entire home network into a local cloud locker.