|
Monday January 22, 2007
|
Imagine being able to copy data from pretty much anything to anything else. From flash drive to iPod, from iPod to PSP, from PSP to external hard drive, from external hard drive to your computer, from a camera to your external hard drive, and more. You'd think it would be a nightmarish jumble of hardware drivers and would probably require a powerful computer just to get started like I did, but thankfully thats not the case.
Post by Alan Henry
The Unicon MCopy USB Mobile Command Center reports to be the solution to the copy to or from anything problem. They call it a mobile command center because it's so tiny-it's small enough to fit in your pocket, and features a 3.5-inch color touch screen that you use to copy data from any device connected to the 2 USB ports and 1 Mini USB port around the frame of the screen. The screen is bright and backlit with adjustable brightness, and sports 320x240 resolution, much similar to your average PDA or smartphone. The MCopy also has an internal SD card expansion slot and an infared port for communicating wirelessly with your computer or other devices. Unicon even says that you could connect even more devices to the MCopy by connecting USB hubs to the USB ports, and copy data directly to and from media cards and disks by plugging in USB card readers and external CD/DVD drives and writers. No word on whether you'll be able to dump data to blank CDs or DVDs just by connecting an external writer, though.
The MCopy was unveiled at MacWorld, and the folks from Unicon demoed it by copying music and video from iPods to PSPs and from external hard drives to iPods, not to mention from cameras and camcorders to iPods and external hard drives. The folks at MCopy even suggest you can copy music from your iPod to your mobile phone-literally any USB device to any other USB device. Also, you can use the MCopy's software to slideshow your own photos, copied from a camera, or video from a camcorder, or even play mp3s and music that you copy from another portable device of your computer. The MCopy isn't just a pass-through, it will also play your media, and even rip CDs in a connected drive to mp3 for you and copy the mp3s to another connected device. You can even add music on one device to a slideshow using pictures from another-the possibilities are pretty impressive.
You can check out the full feature list here. The MCopy isn't in production yet, but Unicon is taking pre-orders for the device now.
Posted By:
Gearlog
|
|
|
Mixx It
Digg It
Stumble
More...
January 24, 2007 2:26 PM
There's a product out there doing this today for under $100...It's callled Hitch and it's at Best Buy, J&R Music, etc....Has anyone done a comparison?
January 24, 2007 4:38 PM
Hi Binker! I think that the MCopy picks up in a lot of ways from where the Hitch left off. Not only can you connect more than one USB device at a time to the MCopy, something you can't do with the Hitch, it supports video and pictures as well, something the Hitch doesn't.
Additionally, the Hitch doesn't support Mac-formatted iPods and NTFS formatted USB storage devices, which the MCopy does. The Hitch is also primarily for use with PCs, whereas the MCopy is a cross platform device. The Hitch won't fly with MTP devices like Creative's players, whereas the MCopy will do that as well.
The MCopy seems to have more features than the Hitch, and a bright LCD screen with touch controls. It also supports more devices, more file systems, and the fact that it can be daisy-chained across multiple USB devices and you can play music and video straight through it adds to its functionality. I wouldn't say it's "better," but I would say that it has a lot of features the Hitch lacks-and you'll likely pay much more than the Hitch for those features. If you don't need them though, the Hitch is a great option.