LaCie DataShare
Company: LaCie
Price: $12.99 from Lacie.com
http://www.lacie.com
LaCie Flat Cable USB A to mini B
Company: LaCie
Price: $9.99 from LaCie.com
http://www.lacie.com
LaCie, the company known best for its hard drives, has also developed a reputation for stylishly designed accessories. The DataShare, for example, is little more than two card readers, the red side with an SD card slot, the white with a micro SD slot, but its designers clearly wanted something that was not only functional but attractive. When not in use, you plug the two units together and it makes a nice conversation piece.
It’s small enough to fit in a shirt pocket but you can also attach it to a key ring or drop it in your camera bag. If you choose, you can also use the red side for both the SD card and the micro SD because it comes with an adaptor. The adaptor looks like an ordinary SD card but look closely at its end and you’ll notice a tiny slot for a microSD. I say look closely because you’re not going to find anything on the package that explains the adaptor.
Slide the adaptor card into the red side and slide your microSD into the tiny slot at its end; then plug the unit into any USB 2.0 or USB 1.1 port. Like many similar products, you can use the DataShare and your SD card as a flash drive from which to upload and download files to and from your computer. The DataShare requires no software installation. Just insert your SD card and push the drive into any USB port. It also comes with a short USB extension. The device is compatible with Mac or Windows-based computers.
The card reader is fast, with a maximum transfer rate of up to 480Mbits/s. Supported formats include Secure Digital and micro Secure Digital (including SDHC).
A word of advice: If you pick one of these things up, ignore the dimensions listed under specifications on the back of the package. The drive is actually 2.7 X 1.3 X .51 inches. Oddly, the package containing the drive lists the dimensions of the box it ships in, rather than the dimensions of the drive itself.
If you don’t need a card reader that will double as a flash drive, and all you want to do is upload photos from your camera to your computer, you can spend $9.99 for LaCie’s sleek blue flat USB A to mini B cable. Chances are your camera came with its own cable that enables you to transfer photos directly from the camera to the computer, but it if you lost it, or really want one that is flat and blue and attention-grabbing, this may be just what you’re looking for. It’s 3.9 feet long (1.2 cm).
The cable comes with 24 stick-on labels so if you have lots of gadgets in a hub you can tell at a glance which cable is connected to each device.
MyMac.com Rating (Both accessories): 5 out of 5
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