hello I'm Wanderer001 and this is my review of the HooToo trip mate
elite have you ever had something that you use pretty regularly to the point
where you forget that it's something that you need to actually review or to
tell other people about well sadly that is the case of the HooToo trip mate elite
here I have in the past reviewed over there HooToo - trip mate
Titan but I gave that to somebody and they kind of kept it and I didn't get it
back so I went out and I purchased the HooToo trip made elite it has been a
godsend and I'll explain why the problem is and why I say I waited a bit too long
is it is difficult to find the trip mate elite here anymore they're kind of
moving off to a different form factor they still do sell the trip mate
Titan but the trip made elite sadly is a little harder to come by and I'm gonna
talk about the pluses and minuses of the elite here versus the Titan versus what
they've kind of replaced this with but what you are looking at is a device that
is 3.2 inches long 3.2 inches wide because it is a square and has a depth
of 1.4 inches now as you can see it is very glossy on the front and on the back
here it picks up fingerprints and scratches but that's not terrible it
also gives you a little information there as to what it is battery capacity
which I will be talking about shortly on the bottom there you can see some ports
we're going to talk about that in a moment and on top there is nothing there
is a single power slash indicator button here on we're gonna call at the left a
quick tap will show you how much battery is left in the device so it has a six
thousand milliamp battery and depending on usage is how long that lasts can't
give you a definitive answer it all depends on what you're using it for if
you press and hold this button it will activate its Wi-Fi now that is because
the trip mate elite here is a Swiss Army knife for travellers and everybody
should have something like this with them when they travel what do I mean
well it's a battery backup because those ports on the bottom here allow you
to charge two devices at once maximum output of the upper one is one amp and
the bottom one is one amp or 2.1 amps so battery backup 6000 milliamp battery
backup it also can act as a wireless bridge or an access point or a Wi-Fi
router or a Wi-Fi extender or a file hub yes it does all of these things so
coming back to the the port's here notice it does have a a thern ette port
this Ethernet port will allow you to plug in directly to Ethernet cable and
use this as a Wi-Fi router so hypothetically when you go to a hotel
and they either do not offer free Wi-Fi or they only allow you to have free
wired internet or they charge you per device well plug in your Ethernet back
there turn this on you have your own Wi-Fi router and you pay for one
connection it can also act as an extender by accessing your wireless
connection you can then place this further along in your house and kind of
extend your Wi-Fi if you're having a problem with that
not great speeds when you do that but we'll talk about that a little later
also acts as a access point slash file hub so not having this connected to
Wi-Fi just turning it on will allow you to plug a USB right up there either USB
stick or a hard drive and access movies music files wirelessly through the HooToo
elite here got to love that also if you are using this as I file help you
can also charge at the same time so there's a little reset button there I
gotta use a push pin for it coming back to the side that has the power button if
we press and hold this is how you power the device on you will watch the white
light slowly go up and then it flashes green quickly and then blue once it is
transmitting now doing that in Reverse and there it is trying to access my
network because I do have it acting as a bridge as well
so once that happens it will show green but I don't necessarily know if I'm
gonna make you sit through that there we go pressing and holding it will show you
those LEDs in Reverse and there you go green and off so six thousand milliamp
battery how long does that take to charge well takes between four and a
half hours to five hours with and this is the big reason I like this a little
more than I liked the Titan this side has a built in wall connection now with
the Titan you needed a cable and you needed a wall adapter this has one built
in that is why I like this over the Titan even though the Titan has a much
larger internal battery now with this you are looking at a device that will be
transmitting in 2.4 gigahertz only so you're not going to be getting 5
gigahertz out of this it's not terrible remember you're not trying to do crazy
things with this but if you are looking for speeds and range range I tested it
either sitting right next to it I'll put some things up on the screen now signal
strength right next to it really good going all the way into my back bedroom
passed a electrical box past a couple doors the the signal didn't degrade as
much as I thought it would connection speed is where it hurt in my bedroom I
was looking at like 11 megabytes down through this while using my standard 2.4
cuz I made sure to check 2.4 gigahertz Asus router I was getting fifty seven
point one down sitting right next to it you're looking at fourteen point three
down and versus my Asus router which was giving me 68 down on again 2.4 gigahertz
spectrum so I did mention that you can watch videos you can look at media let
me show you how you do that through the app
so here is a look at the trip mate
application I currently have a hard drive plugged into it
so like I said before it can accept a actual spinning hard disk external hard
drive now this is the newer version of the application
the older version of the application kind of gives you a warning message but
it's still actually accessible if you wanted to use it now the newer
application kind of starts showing you videos photos music these are things
that it figures you want to go into now sadly if I click on this it's going to
show you that there's nothing in there that's one of them that's one of the
problems that I found with this particular app because it's looking for
specific things that are listed as those items
it doesn't always pick them up so that's a little problematic now if I were to go
into music and then go local because you can switch between local and whatever's
plugged into your trip mate there you can see I have all of these audio files
and I could put hearts next time if I wanted to can show me my top 25 and then
if I had any favorites it could show me there also you have these boxes up here
you can click on that and this will allow you to change some of the look and
feel of the application but realistically you're not going to be
looking into that all that much you're really doing this so that you can access
your data so if you come over to file and folders it will show you here is my
single Drive that is connected and if we come down we're gonna go look for my
YouTube videos oh wait I'm sorry it is on the local so we're gonna move it over
to the trip mate now we're going to go look for my YouTube videos because this
is the video backup this is the hard drive that I used for my video backups
and giving you a little sneak peek of the secret sauce behind the scenes here
so let's go and do cross bars that I did for my Forester so I was in here playing
around before so if we hit OK it will resume based on where I left off now it
does buffer a little bit and I found that with a spinning hard drive it
buffers a bit more than it would with a actual
SSD or flash drive now I will say that this is a full 1080 60 frames a second
video if it was smaller it would be able to buffer much faster and should be
getting there just about now cuz it's normally about 4 to 5 percent that it
starts to play it don't make a liar out of me alright so there you go it's it's
doing the playback it is doing audio as well you just can't hear because I have
the lapel mic on but like I said this is a full 1080 video playing back over the
HooToo device now if you wanted to like I said you plug in a flash drive it will
do it much faster now unlike the other HooToo application it has a standard
video player as part of the application so you don't actually have to go and
send the video out to VLC or something of that nature
so aside from the file folder here the other thing that you're gonna be looking
at is this these system settings and it does do that weird tilt I'm not sure why
it does it but it does it's not something to worry about here you have
your trip mate settings clicking on this will allow you to adjust your Wi-Fi
settings so coming here it will show you the SSID for your trip mate it will show
you what channel it's currently on the mode it's in and the security so if you
wanted to change your channel you can just come up here and select whatever
channel you wanted so after Wi-Fi setting you have land
settings you can click in there to show you clicking on land settings shows you
some information that I won't be showing you but it's their internet settings
clicking on that again will show you Internet settings you can configure your
network settings you can also this is how you can join a network so you can
either use it as a bridge or a network extender and then you have system
settings which will allow you to change your users change the host name disc
information which is whatever's plugged into it and then firmware upgrade you
always want to make sure that your firmware is most up-to-date and
currently I am most up-to-date here you have extra
information most of which you don't really need to play with it's just the
trip made settings up there you can also log out of your trip mate directly from
here rather than just dropping your Wi-Fi connection so that was a look at
the trip mate application for your Android phone it does have a web UI as
well but it does have a lot of the same similarities that this does you can set
up your trip mate either using the application or the web UI
now notice up here I didn't mention forget this you will notice that it will
show you the power level of your trip mate as well as if you are connected to
the internet so you can use it as a bridge
now the beauty of the connected
ports there this will work with either a hard drive or a flash based system now
one of the things I did not mention was that you can only be streaming to five
devices at a time but for most families that's going to be enough for a long car
trip the other thing that I did not show is the default password which one you
definitely should change to get on to the who to via the Wi-Fi is eight number
ones there is no admin password setup for the interface change that you really
need to change that the maximum hard drive that this will be able to
understand and accept is a four terabyte hard drive now the plug and your outputs
it does support pastors so you can charge this at the same time you are
using it or trying to charge another device because again those actors
charging ports which you can do both at the same time well like I said sadly the
HooToo elite here is a little harder to find than it was when I first got it to
replace the Titan if you can find it you're looking to be spending about
forty three dollars is what I'm gonna call a good price for this and again the
Titan has a larger battery pack which I like what they replace the elite with is
a smaller thing that you need to plug in to have it work now there
if it's that I understand because all the marketing for it is like oh you can
plug in a battery pack to it you can put it anywhere yeah that's that's great but
that's another cable that I have to remember another battery that I have to
worry about with this as long as it was fully charged I can put it wherever I
wanted to and just turn it on and use it or I could plug it in and not have to
have any extra cables and use it that way so there are some reasons why I
really wished that this was a little easier to find and they didn't replace
it with something that you just have to plug in to make it work but if you can
find the HooToo trip mate elite here for $43 I highly suggest adding it to your
toolbox especially if you travel a lot and you are a heavy Internet user
creator whatever you want to call it something like this is invaluable and
one that doesn't require you to have it plugged in is even more valuable in my
opinion so I have been Wanderer001 if you have any questions or comments
please feel free to leave them in the area below and as always thanks for
watching