I'm off doing some travelling soon so I finally bought a photo storage solution - a Hyperdrive Space direct from their Hypershop. I bought the version without a hard disk so I could whack my wife's old harddisk into it. It's only 40Gb but it's good enough for now. The shipping added about £15 and then there was another £25 for duty and customs clearance. Ouch!

But I quickly got it working. It does exactly what is says on the tin. I like it. Simple and fast. I haven't really had any chance to use it in earnest but I'm confident it will be fine. Eventually as technology moves on, it will just wind up being an external hard disk with built-in card readers. I figure it will be a long time before I need to dump it.

I did consider getting a mutimedia viewer device and was very tempted by the Vosonic VP8360. No point going to the VP8390 due to the short lifetime of an OLED display. But the VP8360 had some good reviews and has an upgradeable hard disk and battery. You get extra functionality but trade-off useability, speed and battery life.

With all these specialty devices, I find a lot of it boils down to battery life and rock solid firmware that you can trust. I'd rather have a device with less features that I can trust really works. From reading around the 'net, I got the feeling the hyperdrive did what it did well while the Vosonic had more issues. Multimedia viewers also have a much shorter lifetime before they get outdated.

Unless some fabulous media viewer device comes to market, I expect I'll buy a Ultra Mobile PC one day to do that job. It's more functional and futureproof than a dedicated multimedia viewer. I hope Intels new 2007 platform for the 2nd generation of UMPC will see some great products coming to market. The 2006 platform certainly didn't cut it.