A useful iPod?
Supposedly, Apple will announce the latest upgrades and accessories for its iPod digital music player. The new peripherals are rumored to include one add-on that might make me look at the iPod as a useful tool rather than just an overpriced toy. A flash card reader would allow digital photographers to dump their camera's cards to the ultra-portable iPod's hard drive in the field. However, it is Apple, so I won't be too surprised if their reader only supports some uncommonly-used memory chip format instead of the prevalent Compact Flash. [via Gizmodo, as usual]
Update: Looks like the iPod Media Reader will support all the usual suspects (Compact Flash, SD / MMC, Smart Media, Memory Stick) of today's digital camera market after all. At a price worthy of Steve Jobs's ego, of course.
I just bought the first generation of Archos Multimedia Jukebox, new 18 months ago or so, off ebay for under $300. I got the super bundle that included cardreaders for both compact flash and smartmedia and a combo 1mp still/video camera. It's got a 20gig hard drive in it, USB2 connection, video/audio out, and an audio line in (plus built-in mic) for on-the-fly mp3 encoding. There are two other attachments I haven't got: an FM tuner with Tivo-like capabilities and a video line-in for on-the-fly recording of MPEG4 movies off any video source. It's got a tiny but really sharp color screen, so you can watch movies right on the thing. All in all, it's a right nice device. They're on their third generation now, with better features at thrice the price. But look on ebay for a new MMJB20 with "camera super-bundle". If you don't mind being behind the times with your hardware, you can't beat it. Oh -- one other thing. I did have to buy a third-party compactflash/SD adapter ($20-something) to be able to read my camera's SD cards.
Steve do tend to be *real* proud of his'stuff, don' he?
-- j
i want a product that only reads compact flash cards for the ipod. because, as you said compact flash is by far the more common of any. it would also be cheaper than that damn belkin one!