It’s not often nowadays that you see new products which really make sense, mostly they’re devices looking for a home in our wallets. But every so often, just now and again, something will pop up which makes you go ‘yeah, that’s actually a really good idea and makes a lot of sense’.

The new Netgear Centria is an all in one media center, WiFi router and automatic back up server, and each of those functions fit together so perfectly you’ve got to ask why someone didn’t do this before. The product comes in two configurations, one without a hard drive included (you supply your own) and the other with a 2TB drive already inside. We suggest that for ease of use, unless you’re a techie, you stump up the extra cash for the latter.

The Centria features the well known Netgear Genie software to make set up as easy as possible, so if you’re used to Netgear products you’ll be right at home out of the box. It also comes with two USB 3.0 ports for external hard drive hook ups, and the internal drive can be swapped out/upgraded as needed. Which means it could become a very expandable part of your backup process over time.

We haven’t played with one of these yet, but if the media center and backup functions work as well as they should, this will be the perfect product for non-techies to install as a one stop for their home network. The diskless version is $260.94 and the 2TB version is $349.99.