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Introduction

The Super Digibin, from Leading Spect Corporation (www.leadingspect.com.tw/), is a new entry in the "digital wallet" market. In brief, it combines a portable hard drive, Compact Flash reader, and USB connectivity, and is aimed at digital camera "power users". This review looks at its features, usability, and compares it briefly with its competitors.

Digital Wallets

Large portable storage devices that use hard drives, such as Apple's iPod and Minds@Work's MindStor, are really taking off. One of the main markets, and the market that the Digibin targets, is digital camera users who lust for more storage. Camera resolutions are improving, and filesizes growing accordingly. Four megapixel cameras are standard now in the consumer / prosumer sector, which produce files exceeding two megabytes. Although Flash-based storage capacities are growing, it still costs too much for most people to buy a 512Mb or 1Gb Compact Flash card, and even that may not be enough. If you don't have easy access to a PC, memory cards just don't cut it. If you're travelling and don't have a laptop, film cameras start to look appealing again - and that's a big call!

Enter the "digital wallet". This inevitable marriage of a portable hard drive and a memory card reader lets you take more photos without returning to your PC. Whenever your memory card fills up, stick in in the reader slot, push a button, and the contents are copied onto the hard drive, leaving you free to keep shooting. When you get back to your PC, days or weeks later, you connect the digital wallet via USB or FireWire, and download all of your photos at once. This is what makes it truly feasible to travel with a digital camera.

The Super Digibin: Exterior

The Super Digibin, which I'll call the Digibin from now on, is very cute little device. The main chassis is metallic plastic with shiny buttons. It is designed to be held in one hand, and it is very easy to hold. On the front is an LCD screen above the controls, and the power button is at the top left corner. The card slot is on the bottom of the device, facing you as you hold it. The USB port and power cable are both on the top, facing away from you. This layout is simple, sensible and intuitive, and very easy to use.

The Digibin ships with a well-designed protective case. All of the Digibin's functions can be used with the case on - in fact, there is no reason you would ever need to take it off. There is a slit in the bottom so you can insert memory cards, and the front of the case is clear so you can see the screen and use the buttons. The case has a belt strap on the back, but I can't really see any need to wear a Digibin.

There is one major design flaw with the Digibin. The power button is mounted on the front of the unit, and is easy to push. So easy to push, in fact, that it can easily be turned on accidentally while the Digibin is in a bag. While it does shutdown automatically after a few minutes of inactivity, battery life is at a premium when you're a long way from civilisation. I would have liked to see a switch, rather than a button, or some other way of making it harder to turn on accidentally. This problem is avoided by one of the Digibin's competitors, the Image Tank (or Image Bank), which uses an external power source.

The Super Digibin: Interior and Specs

Inside the Digibin is a laptop-sized (2.5") hard drive. The unit that I bought came with a 20Gb drive, which was the sweet spot in terms of price and capacity. It's doubtful whether anyone actually NEEDS more than 20Gb of storage for their digital camera, but since the Digibin can also be used as a standard portable hard drive, larger drives may be handy. The drive itself is totally standard, and you can buy units without drives and install your own.

The card reader accepts CompactFlash Type I and II cards, including IBM Microdrives. There are adaptors that allow you to use Smart Media Cards, MultiMedia Cards, Secure Digital Memory Cards, and Memory Sticks. This should cover every modern camera in existence, and if a new format arrives, I'm sure there will be demand for a generic CompactFlash adaptor for that too.

The Digibin has an internal rechargeable battery. It is a LiIon (lithium ion) affair, delivering 7.2 volts, with a quoted battery life of 70 minutes use and 140 minutes standby. The battery is charged when the Digibin is connected to its power supply (an all-countries power supply comes with the unit), and takes a couple of hours for a full charge.

The software that drives the Digibin is upgradeable. I bought my Digibin in Taiwan before they started selling them internationally - the manual was just a photocopy, the driver CD was a CD-R, and the firmware was out of date. As soon as I got it home, I downloaded the newest firmware from Leading Spect's website and followed the upgrade instructions: copy the firmware to the Digibin, turn it off, turn it on, you're done. Easy as that. It's good to know that the firmware is easily changed, in case problems crop up in the future.

Using the Digibin

There's only a few things you can do with a Digibin. You can move data to and from a memory card and the hard drive, or you can delete files. While the functionality is limited, I would actually say that this is more than I wanted it to do! In practise, using the Digibin has come down to: Anything fancier than that can wait until there's computer access. The other features might be handy if you were coming close to your disk's capacity, but with a 20Gb drive that's not a common occurrence.

Using the Digibin is perfectly straightforward. The screen gives you useful information such as the remaining space on both the drive and the card, and lets you know when it is performing disk access.

When attached via USB, the Digibin shows up as two USB Removable Storage devices. Under Windows XP, no drivers are needed at all, which is wonderful. I believe this is the case for Windows 2000 and recent Mac OS versions also. The first drive to show up is the hard drive, and the second is the card reader, so you can transfer straight from card to PC through the Digibin, using it like a standalone card reader. Transfer rates seem a little slower than dedicated card readers, but were not a problem. This is a feature that other devices may not have.

You can also write files back from the hard drive to a memory card. This is useful when your camera has a slide-show feature, or other features that the Digibin doesn't have. You can dump some images back, show them using the camera (either on the camera or on a TV if you can), then delete and do it again. This is a feature that the Image Tank does not have.

Comparison

It seems that the portable storage market is maturing. There is a full spectrum of devices, from high-end units with image-previewing LCD screens, such as the Archos Jukebox to simpler units like the Digibin and the Image Tank. The Digibin is very cheap, selling for around US$300 for a 20Gb. In comparison to the Image Tank, the Digibin adds card-reader functionality, card-writing ability, an internal battery, plus a nicer design. On the downside, the Digibin needs a better power switch.

Conclusion

The Super Digibin has worked very well for me. It has travelled across five countries and stored thousands of photos (some of which you can view here) without losing a single one. It has happily charged on low-quality power across Asia, and has survived its life in my backpack without any problems. It is serving daily use as a file transporter and has not complained at all. Owning a digital wallet has let me take many more photos than I could have otherwise, especially when I'm travelling, which is when I want to take photos the most!

While I recommend the Digibin, I have not used any of its competitors, so I can't tell you that it's better. But it definitely does the job.

Commentary

We've reached the point where hard drives are tough enough to carry, and batteries are good enough to power them. What do we want to do with this storage space? Some people want to listen to their music on the go. Some people want to store photos. Some people just want to move data around. Maybe other people would like to store and playback videos, too.

Currently, devices are being made that serve one or more of these applications. Some have PDA-like functionality too. It seems to me, though, that they're missing the point.

Sure, there are lots of devices that require access to data, but that doesn't mean they need to store it themselves. We need a centralised personal data storage device, like a DigiBin, with a short-range, low-power wireless connection (Bluetooth) to anything that requires it. You leave the Digibin in your bag. Your Bluetooth MP3 player reads data from it and pipes it to your headphones. Your digital camera has no memory card, it just sends the photo data via Bluetooth. Your PDA uses it as its data repository too.

Currently, portable storage is limited to single-use functions: at one time, only one device can use a memory card, or a hard drive. This means people either swap cards from device to device, or buy multiple cards. When you remove this constraint through wireless connectivity, the way you use your data storage changes.

It's gonna happen, I swear. But until then, I'm happy using my Digibin.

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