Every once in a while some company will cook up a gadget that makes even the most hardcore power user step back and say “wow.” RAVPower took a stab at that with their FileHub, a portable Swiss army knife for your smartphone. It's a portable battery that also doubles as a travel router that can either bridge connections or connect to another network via ethernet, which also doubles as a mini cloud storage backup device. It's loaded.

But feature lists aren't important if the device can't live up to expectations, right? Let's dig in and find out if this thing is worth your money.

Design

RAVPower didn't try to get too cute with the design of this little box, opting for a pretty basic and compact shape. It looks like a relatively small power bank, but it does have some LEDs, buttons, and flaps all around it. On the top side you'll notice a strip of lights that tell you the battery status of the FileHub, plus the current status of the network connection on the device. It'll light up differently depending on if it's acting a WiFi network, a bridged connection, or however else you set things up.

There's a power button on the side connected to that strip, while the opposite side houses the SD card slot plus two buttons for changing WiFi connectivity and resetting the box if it freezes up.

On the bottom of the FileHub you'll find a USB A port, micro USB charging port, and an ethernet connection hidden behind a plastic flap. The flap is a strange choice because these are your most commonly accessed ports, and it's not like this thing is waterproof. Hopefully the flap doesn't wear out over time.

Features

So let's talk about what this thing can do.

As a travel router, the biggest thing this can do for someone on the road is give them an easy and secure way to access a wireless network via just an ethernet port. Let's say your hotel room has an ethernet port but not an easily accessible wireless network; simply plug in the FileHub, connect your phone, tablet, or computer, and you're off to the races. Even if you're not traveling, you can still plug this thing into a modem and get your own mini network in a pinch. It's an AC750 router, so there's enough bandwidth for a couple devices to do some work without sputtering out. You can also set it up in bridge mode, which loses the 5GHz part of the network, but still allows you to connect even if you don't have an ethernet port to use.

Once your devices are connected, the features open up even further. You can just use it as a router if you want, but RAVPower wants this thing to be the hub of your connected traveling experience. You can utilize that USB port to connect a flash drive or hard drive, then use RAVPower's FileHub app to access everything on it. Whether you're using your phone or a computer, you can have full access to everything on that connected storage. If you're working, that means you get all of your documents and files, and if you're just hanging out then you can cache up a ton of movies and music and whatever else you need for entertainment. Pretty nifty, especially if you have a device that can handle a lot of different formats and files.

And if you want to know an even cooler party trick built in here, the app supports DLNA so you can beam files from your connected storage to a Chromecast or other DLNA-enabled screen somewhere else. Pretty nifty.

That transfer can go the opposite direction as well, so you can use the FileHub as a local backup device. You can have the app set to automatically back up your photos and videos from your phone to any connected storage, which is a perfect solution for making copies and backups of things like vacation pictures while you're on the go, as opposed to waiting until you get home and hoping everything makes it back with you.

Oh, and don't forget about the 6700mAh battery. That powers the FileHub, but it can charge up your phone in a pinch, too.

Performance

To really test this thing out, we ran a couple different scenarios to see how it held up. RAVPower promises a lot, after all, but cramming all of this stuff into a small box doesn't necessarily mean that the performance will match the laundry list of things it can do.

The battery was the easiest thing to test, especially since we do review quite a few different batteries on Talk Android. Unfortunately, this is probably the weakest aspect of the FileHub, but only because that 6700mAh battery has to power a lot of things. As a pure backup battery for your phone, well, it's certainly not the biggest we've seen, but it's much clunkier than similar sized batteries. In a pinch, it's going to be just fine to get your phone by with a single charge, but don't rely on it too heavily. It's also absolutely useless for a tablet or laptop.

My recommendation? Don't plan on using it to charge up your phone except in absolute emergencies. It's best used to power the FileHub on its own while it's temporarily away from power or during outages.

To test out video playback and backups, I connected my 8TB hard drive that I typically use for a Plex server to the FileHub, which had plenty of space for backing up photos and storing movies and music to test out. Results were kind of mixed.

First things first, you're going to be using RAVPower's app a lot to access your media, and that's where most of the issues seem like the pop up. The design is really just okay, but it hangs a lot when it's doing things like reading your hard drive for the first time. It doesn't really give an indication that it's doing anything, though, so it just seems frozen. But once that's out of the way, navigation isn't too bad, and the app is pretty colorful, too.

The very first thing I did was to test out the backup features, so I backed about three photos and my entire contact list up to my portable hard drive. Everything looked good in the app, but when I connected the drive back to my computer it was like nothing had happened. The backups weren't there. The second and third time I tried to back things up were flawless, though, so that could've just been a fluke. Made me nervous for photo backups, though.

But nervousness aside, the process was really quick and easy, and so far this seems like one of the most intuitive and fastest ways to batch move a ton of pictures onto an external drive without physically connecting your phone to a computer. Once again, that's a serious selling point for family vacations.

Next up, I tried to stream video. Specifically, I picked a 4K HDR copy of The Avengers, just to see if throwing a high-resolution, HDR file would throw this thing for a loop.

Good news? No problems at all. I tested on a Galaxy S10 and iPhone XS Max, and both managed to play the files without any buffering. Skipping through the movie was also fast and responsive, and nothing ever had to stop and think. However, the iPhone was the only one that played back audio with that particular movie. The Galaxy S10 couldn't read the audio track for the file, so it was a silent film. Kinda ruins superhero movies, you know?

The Galaxy S10 was able to decode audio for some other movies, though, so it's likely just an incompatibility with that particular encoding. The FileHub app also lets you open up files in third-party players on Android, so if something's not working, just grab VLC and be done with it.

What I couldn't ever get to work, though, was the DLNA casting. The Galaxy S10 never found any other devices nearby, and while the iPhone found and listed them, it couldn't ever connect or do anything, and I don't know which is least helpful. Once again, though, using the Galaxy S10 would allow you to open the file in your app of choice and cast that way. Or, if all else fails, just download the file locally to your phone and play it that way. Flexibility helps out the FileHub a lot.

Worth buying?

If you're a power user who spends a lot of time on the road or backing up files, this thing is an easy purchase, especially at $59. But there's enough flakiness here that I think it's best reserved for power users. Having to fiddle with getting files just right can be a pain, and if you really want to make the most of it, you're probably going to need another app to play videos, and you'll need to be very comfortable with managing files and settings things up properly. Having a PC to do all of this with makes the whole thing easier, too, which is something that not everyone has anymore.

However, for iOS users, having something like this does open up a ton of options for local file management. That's less of a selling point for Android, since, you know, Android handles that on its own.

For a casual user using the FileHub as a backup tool, it's okay, but with the abundance of free/cheap cloud storage everywhere, it's hard not to recommend something like Google Photos and some cheap Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox storage, even though those still come with their own drawbacks.

The FileHub is a really cool gadget, but be careful that it doesn't end up sitting in your drawer two weeks after you buy it.

Buy it now: Amazon