Articles tagged with: peripherals

It’s not quite as pocketable as a USB flash drive, Buffalo’s new 500Gb MiniStation TurboUSB offers considerably more storage capacity. There’s a 2.5in laptop hard drive inside its armoured exterior and the captive USB cable wraps around the case for storage. The 500Gb drive is expected to cost around £244, the 400Gb around £183.

[Buffalo]

If you use a laptop for long periods in one place (your desk, for instance), it's a good idea to plug in an external mouse and keyboard - and a monitor, if you have one - so that you're not sitting with a hunched posture all day. Connecting and disconnecting this lot each day is a bit of a bind though, which is where a docking station comes in.

Most laptop manufacturers offer optional docking stations but they only tend to work with one particular range of laptops. If you don't mind making a few small sacrifices (of which more later), a third-party dock is a cheaper solution. We had high hopes for the Belkin High-Speed Docking Station we reviewed last year, but it had a few too many limitations for our liking and the ExpressCard connection meant that it wouldn't work with all laptops. The Toshiba DynaDock, on the other hand, connects via USB - which means it'll work with anything.

If your laptop doesn’t have an internal DVD writer, you don’t need to spend a fortune on an external model. LG’s GSA-E50N supports every disc format going and is one of the cheapest portable DVD writers we’ve seen.

CMS' latest product is supposed to make it easy to back up your data and then resume working from that backup in the event that your laptop is lost, stolen or just stops working. With a 160Gb portable USB hard disk and backup software in the box, CMS not only promise to keep your data safe, but secure too, thanks to 256-bit AES encryption.

Belkin has launched a Bluetooth USB adaptor which uses Kodak's Picture Upload technology for wirelessly transferring images from a cameraphone to a PC, printer or other Bluetooth-enabled device. The company says it will be ideal for people wanting to publish cameraphone images on websites such as MySpace and FaceBook.

The USB adaptor conforms to Bluetooth version 2.0 +EDR and works with Bluetooth-compatible PCs, PDAs, headsets and printers. It's compatible with Windows XP and Windows Vista PCs and is currently on sale in North America for $49 (£25). Belkin says a European launch will follow later.

[Belkin]

If you want to cram loads of data into a portable hard drive, then Western Digital has the answer. Its latest WD Passport Portable Drive offers up to 320GB storage capacity, along with 128-bit encryption software and WD sync software for synchronsing files and Microsoft Outlook on a PC. It sounds like a lot of storage space, but with many PCs now stuffed with music files, high-resolution digital images and video, hard disk space can soon become a scarce commodity.

The new pocket-sized drive weighs around 100 grams and also includes Google Desktop search tool and Picasa photo management software. It's also USB-powered, so there's no need for a separate power supply.The 320GB drive costs $230 (£125) and is available from Western Digital's online store.

[Western Digital]

We rarely feature printers on the pages of Mobile Computer, but Lexmark’s latest all-in-one, the X4850, has a nifty trick up its sleeve — wireless printing over your home Wi-Fi network. That may not sound particularly useful, but think about it, that’ll let you print documents from the sofa while watching TV, or scan a document on the printer without having to bring the laptop to it to plug in the USB cable.

Most manufacturers offer optional docking stations to allow their laptops to be plugged into a more traditional set-up, but they tend to be both pricey and proprietary. Belkin’s High-Speed Docking Station, on the other hand, does much the same thing for any laptop with an ExpressCard/34 slot.