Review: izzbie ONE

The izzbie ONE is now live as a Kickstarter campaign. I recently had a chance to test out one of the devices so I can share my thoughts with you here.

About izzbie ONE

izzbie ONE allows individuals and businesses to securely and remotely access their home and office network easier than ever before. Also, since you are accessing your own private network, all your online activities are protected with encryption without going through any third-party providers and it allows you to access geo-restricted content. Therefore, users will enjoy the safest online experiences with complete privacy.

I’ve had a VPN setup on my iMac for a long time, and I’ve had lots of issues with failed connections, or times when I could not access a lot of stuff. Really, the only thing it let me do consistently was use my home IP address on the go. I could not connect a Windows machine or Android device to it–only iOS or macOS devices.

The izzbie ONE is just a little black box device you plug into your router via an Ethernet cable. It is a simple plug-and-play connection, then you go into the control panel for the izzbie ONE and add the internal IP addresses of the items you would like to access on your network, such as printers, or NAS (network attached storage).

During my testing, everything worked flawlessly. I was at an event out of town, staying in a hotel room and first tested by loading the web page for my printer. It loaded with no problem, and I was able to successfully print something from my hotel room to my printer at home. It went through without any problem.

Next, I connected to my NAS unit without issue as well. Then–just for fun–I connected to my Playstation 4 console at home from the hotel. Everything worked beautifully and at a very fast speed–there was no noticeable lag or speed slowdown. Obviously, though, if your home network is on a gigabit broadband connection, but you’re connecting to it over 4G / LTE cellular hotspot from an area with poor signal where you only have a 1-bar connection and it falls back to 2G speeds, that will be the speed of your connection to your home network. But, the izzbie ONE supports 4K video streaming as long as your connection has the bandwidth, so if you have good enough connection in both locations you can theoretically stream a 4K movie stored on a NAS at your home or office.

I only have one of the devices and at my home, but they indicated they will be sending me another one to setup at work because they want me to also test the ability to be connected to two networks at once. So, I could theoretically print something to my home network while also accessing data from a NAS at work without having to switch back and forth.

I can see this benefiting a lot of people from individuals to businesses.

Home/Individual User

Individuals can use this device to print documents to their home printer on the go, or access their files or videos when away from home. If you’re out of town at a family reunion and want to show your family photos from your recent vacation, but don’t want to fill up your phone with 10GB of photos, you can just store them on a NAS at home and view them from any connected device.

If you’re out of the country on a trip, but don’t want to miss your favorite show on Netflix you can watch it over the connection from your home IP address to view content that is geographically restricted and unavailable where you are. Don’t worry, izzbie doesn’t use standard VPN ports or protocols, so Netflix cannot block or filter it.

Business/Corporate User

Setting up and managing a VPN typically requires a large investment and skilled professionals to implement it. With izzbie ONE, you can have a secure remote connection without buying a bunch of equipment and you won’t need an entire IT department to run it.

Imagine, you’re on a business tri,p but someone back at the office needs a form for a meeting. Easy. Just print it from wherever you are to their printer back at the office. Or, maybe you need to work on a project from home in order to finish before the deadline. Just pull the data from the file server back at the office while you’re sitting in your living room. It also comes in handy for international trips–just like the home / individual user above, connecting remotely to the izzbie ONE sends traffic through your home IP addresss so you can view Netflix and other regionally-restricted content.

The Bad

As great as my experience was, I do have a few minor complaints:

Currently you can only add 3 IPs for your devices. If you have any more then that, I’m pretty sure it will require an account upgrade–so plan on paying an additional fee.
It only comes with one user account. So, either every user needs their own device (and account), or you have to invite people to share the credentials of the one account you have. Alternatively, you can purchase additional user account subscriptions without buying another device. Regardless, you must either share the credentials or invest money to obtain additional accounts.
I’d love to see it with PoE (Power Over Ethernet) functionality instead of needing its own power outlet. It’s a small device, so I’m pretty sure it doesn’t take much juice to power the thing.
Its Ethernet only. Inevitably, there will be businesses and individuals that will need to put it in a location where there is no wired Ethernet connection available. It would be great if it there was alos a Wi-Fi version or if Wi-Fi capabilities could be integrated into this device. s

These few downfalls are relatively minor, though, and the device worked very well for me. I give it a score of 9 out of 10 overall. You can back the Kickstarter project now. For $129 you will receive one izzbie ONE device and a one-year subscription to the underlying service. The product is slated to ship in October of this year.