Big mistake purchasing the Monument system? – Monument Photo Management Review

Well, I had high hopes for Monument. I was a early backer on Indigogo. But I didn't expect to receive what I received in the mail and also didn't expect a mediocre app. The hardware feels like cheap, light plastic. The design is confusing and seems unnecessary. It's a black box with a large hole/space where you're supposed to put an external hard drive. From what we can figure out, all the hardware does is allow you to connect your hard drive to your TV. It does not provide any storage. We were under the assumption that you could plug your iPhone directly into the device and could upload photos directly on the device. It doesn't seem that simple now that we have the system. And it's not clear at all why you MUST attach the device to a television in order to make it work. The app is not intuitive. We tried to test the system by uploading 354 photos from my iPhone. The app was uploading photos for over 30 minutes and only completed 30ish of them. For another hour, the app just kept spinning and trying to "authenticate". The instructions in the help are not helpful. We still can't figure out what the app is supposed do or how this system is supposed to help. Do you upload photos to the app from your phone and then save them to the external hard drive that you've plugged in to the Monument device? How is that any better or different than just saving your photos to the cloud? Why does the Monument device need to be plugged in to a TV to work? Why doesn't the app actually upload all of the photos selected? So far, we can't figure this whole thing out and it's certainly not making photo storage any easier.
Review by Alexfi24 on Monument Photo Management.