Meet the Lima Ultra, a tiny device that lets you create a personal cloud and control your data more easily. Think about it as a Dropbox alternative with data sitting on a hard drive in your home. The Lima Ultra is a new and improved version of the original Lima. It’s more powerful and you can expect a big performance boost.
The idea behind the Lima Ultra is still the same. It’s a small white box with an Ethernet port on one side, and a USB port on the other. Setting up the device is as easy as plugging it to your router and a USB hard drive.
After that, you’ll be able to access files sitting on this hard drive from all of your devices. The company released apps for your computer, phone and tablet. For instance, on a computer, you can drag and drop files to your Lima to store them in “the cloud,” which is really just the hard drive sitting next to your router.
After that, you can stream music, movies and open documents from your phone. In particular, if you have a phone with very little space, the Lima Ultra can help you access your media files from anywhere.
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In many ways, the Lima Ultra works like a cheap, dumbed-down NAS (network-attached storage). If you don’t know anything about NAS and don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on a NAS, then Lima devices can be a good option for you. Similarly, if you don’t want to spend $99 a year on a Dropbox Pro subscription and you don’t want Dropbox or Microsoft or Google to be able to see your data, then you could also opt for a Lima Ultra.
Behind the scene, the Lima Ultra packs a much more powerful processor. The quad core 1.5GHz CPU combined with more RAM and a Gigabit Ethernet port should make transfers much faster. You should really feel the difference if you’re trying to stream a very large movie.
Even browsing files should be faster, and remote connections should start more quickly. If you’re away from your home, just make sure the upload speed on your home connection is fast enough to let you stream files from there. You can also expect more software updates thanks to the more powerful components inside the new device.
What if you already have an original Lima device? The company already lets you run two Limas side by side so that everything is mirrored and backed up between the two drives.
You can order the Lima Ultra today on the company’s website for $129. The company plans to deliver the devices in 25 countries in December 2016.