I wrote: : for those contemplating a digital wallet that will change with your needs : or even just considering a portable hard drive, these might be worth : looking at.. : : http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7523194566 : (nothing to do with me other than I bought one) : : I'll run it through it's paces when it arrives and let you know how good it : is, but the idea that it can access other USB devices or memory types : through a reader has a great appeal :-) OK, I have had it for a few days and threw it a few tasks after first fitting a lowly 5Gb hard drive. Impressions: It's not as ugly as I thought it'd be and the power supply case that takes the AA batteries is not as odd a design as I first thought. The case aesthetics are fine though not up to apple© standards and once it's wrapped it it's stylish carry case it looks fine although a bit utilitarian. The case is made from anodised aluminium with translucent ends, the LED display lights are green, red and importantly they also have a kewl blue light to indicate hdd activity :-) I popped in some almost flat batteries to start it off and the drive indicated everything was fine and I fed it the first card via a USB reader where upon it began copying the contents for a bit then squeaked an error and flashed the error light. I connected the drive to the PC to see what went wrong and indeed it had copied part of the card into a directory, but failed to get all the files. Changing to new batteries and everything was back on track. I fed it a wide selection of cards which it copied dutifully into discrete directories and then I thought I'd really push the poor thing and give it a hard one. I poked my 256 USB pendrive into it's USB slot.. now this is a rather neat drive which comes from the factory partitioned such that it registers as not just a removable drive, but also as removable floppy drive. I thought that having effectively 2 drives simultaneously connected, especially given that ordinarily the system reads the second drive (the floppy) as a non-hard drive might cause it to panic but instead it just made 2 folders and copied the contents perfectly - system files, hidden files and all! hmmm, must carry that some time and backup everyone's pen drives for a chuckle ;-) One thing it failed at and I really wouldn't expect it to succeed is to backup my phones SIM card through a USB sim card reader, though some new ones that go on a keychain have internal memory and it probably would back that up. Oh one last thing it did - I plugged in my Sony f717 digi and hit the 'copy' button and it copied all the files in the cameras 256M memory in a wink! Didn't even need to pull the card from the camera :-) In all not the prettiest, nor the ugliest - not the all-in-one wonder of the XS-drives, not as kewl as a Nixvue, won't double as an mp3 player / DV player /TV or phone, doesn't have it's own internal rechargeable battery either but there's upsides to that in that AA batteries are readily purchased almost anywhere. finally , it backups up just about anything that connects or can be connected via a USB port be it a card reader, USB mp3 player, camera or anything else I tried it on - all in all good value given as said before that you can bang in any drive you like. karl
