The Gnarbox, sorry, GNARBOX, is an external hard drive-sized box that sucks in photo and video from your camera and streams them to your phone ready for editing and output.

Inside is a ‘laptop class’ quad core processor that’s apparently beefy enough to handle up to 4K video in .MP4, .AVI and .MP4 formats. Stills-wise you can back up .JPG, .PNG and .RAW files from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, Olympus, Samsung, Casio (!), Ricoh, Leica, Minolta, Pentax and Fuji cameras. So yours is probably compatible. Why would you want one?

Backup on the go, edit without a laptop

The Gnarbox has 240GB of internal storage that can back up your memory card at up to 4GB/sec either from the internal SD or microSD card readers. Alternatively you can plug in a different reader via a USB3 port. Then, the clever bit: you can connect the unit to your smartphone to start editing.

The storage on your phone doesn’t get clogged up with the footage: the Gnarbox streams to its companion app to allow you to review footage and make basic edits. You probably won’t be cutting a feature film on your phone but to browse through files and either make a rough video assembly or quickly choose selects, it looks like a fast, easy system to use.

Export, upload, back up your backup

When you’re happy with your edits, in stills or video, you can export them on the Gnarbox which will also automatically send the finished article to various online platforms.

You can also add an external drive to the Gnarbox for more storage, or to back up the box itself. And the company claims you’ll get around four to six hours of usage while video editing. In a pinch you can also use the Gnarbox as an external battery to charge your camera.

Gnarbox: Price and availability

The Gnarbox is a product of a successful Kickstarter campaign - preorders are still open on the company’s site, and deliveries are scheduled to begin in ‘February 2017’ - so any day now.

We’ll be sure to let you know how Lok gets on when he gets his hands on a production Gnarbox!