Home > Consumer Reviews > Belkin Media Reader with Dock Connector for iPod (White)
Belkin Media Reader with Dock Connector for iPod (White)
See it at Amazon.com for $10.00Average Customer Rating
(2.5 out of 5)
Amazon Customer Reviews
Most Helpful First | Newest First | + Share93 of 93 people found the following review helpful:
It works... sort of.
(2 out of 5) by Tom Verbeure on Mar 14, 2004 (Cupertino, CA)I bought this product to store the RAW Canon Digital Rebel photos of my Australia trip. Instead of buying a set of expensive flash cards, I kept my 2 512 MB flash cards and copied the results at the end of the day.
The good:
In the end, it worked and saved me a lot of money, since I already owned an iPod.
The bad: where do I start?
- Copying 512 MB of data almost completely drains the iPod battery. Don't even think about copying more. It doesn't give you a good piece of mind to see the battery indicator go down quickly. Quickly, I decided to fill up the flashcard up to 75% capacity, to have some margin.
- It's EXTREMELY slow. 26 minutes for 512 MB. Not really an issue for me, since I never took more than 50 pictures/day, but other may find this a problem.
- Media Reader battery usage. A set of 4 AAA allowed me to copy roughly 10 512 MB copies. When the batteries run out, everything still seems to work fine until it stops after, say, 12 of the 50 pictures on the card. There's no indication at all about what happened.
- Software Robustness. From time to time, it wouldn't start copying or stop in the middle of a copying session. Restarting always solved the problem, but if this happened at the end, your iPod battery might already be drained by then.
The good:
In the end, it worked and saved me a lot of money, since I already owned an iPod.
The bad: where do I start?
- Copying 512 MB of data almost completely drains the iPod battery. Don't even think about copying more. It doesn't give you a good piece of mind to see the battery indicator go down quickly. Quickly, I decided to fill up the flashcard up to 75% capacity, to have some margin.
- It's EXTREMELY slow. 26 minutes for 512 MB. Not really an issue for me, since I never took more than 50 pictures/day, but other may find this a problem.
- Media Reader battery usage. A set of 4 AAA allowed me to copy roughly 10 512 MB copies. When the batteries run out, everything still seems to work fine until it stops after, say, 12 of the 50 pictures on the card. There's no indication at all about what happened.
- Software Robustness. From time to time, it wouldn't start copying or stop in the middle of a copying session. Restarting always solved the problem, but if this happened at the end, your iPod battery might already be drained by then.
Conclusion: it worked for me, but I can only recommend it if you are really really cash strapped, are a amateur who doesn't shoot that much and already own an iPod with some spare gigabyte. Otherwise you just don't bother.
Tom
45 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
NOT quick
(1 out of 5) by Paul Bramer on Mar 7, 2004 (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)Read the advert carefully: "transfer the pictures quickly via FireWire technology". The Firewire port is used but the transfer is really at USB1 (or less) speeds. Since both the reader and iPod must run on batteries, the slow speed and rapid battery drain can become an issue--quickly. The 5-6 minute download for 128MB may be tolerable; the 20-25 minutes for 500MB probably isn't. Brian VanHarlingen, Sr. Technology Manager for Belkin acknowledges this slow speed (see Belkin FAQs or other review sites). Unfortunately, there are currently no alternatives for transferring from camera to iPod (w/o computer).
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
Not as fast as they claim
(2 out of 5) by M. Easton on Oct 28, 2004 (San Francisco, CA)Though the concept is great, and the controls are straight forward and easy to use, the Belkin Reader falls short of usability.
While out on a location, I was away from a power source and thought the Belkin reader would be a great alternative to lugging a laptop around for file transfers. Trying to transfer 1000 pics off a 1GB CF card was
impossible. The reader would drain a fully charged ipod and still not finish the transfer. Though it claims firewire transfer speeds, I did some tests from home and found otherwise:
100 compressed 2K pics transferred via:
USB1 card reader to computer 1 min 20 sec.
PCMCIA card reader in laptop 45 seconds.
Belkin Media reader 6 min. 45 sec
This was just a simple example. You can see how hundreds of files would take 30 minutes or more. For the price, I'd suggest buying a few more memory cards and not worry about the transfers until you get home, unless you're in no rush and can charge up the ipod regularly.
While out on a location, I was away from a power source and thought the Belkin reader would be a great alternative to lugging a laptop around for file transfers. Trying to transfer 1000 pics off a 1GB CF card was
impossible. The reader would drain a fully charged ipod and still not finish the transfer. Though it claims firewire transfer speeds, I did some tests from home and found otherwise:
100 compressed 2K pics transferred via:
USB1 card reader to computer 1 min 20 sec.
PCMCIA card reader in laptop 45 seconds.
Belkin Media reader 6 min. 45 sec
This was just a simple example. You can see how hundreds of files would take 30 minutes or more. For the price, I'd suggest buying a few more memory cards and not worry about the transfers until you get home, unless you're in no rush and can charge up the ipod regularly.
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
Not compatible with all ipods other than mini's
(1 out of 5) by Matthew S. Kallio on Feb 18, 2006So I just purchased the reader to take on a trip figured it would be nice to have. Well not so nice if you have the ipod video because it's not compatible so just a heads up if you are going to buy this item.
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
Slow, and stick to JPEGS
(3 out of 5) by Steve Azer on Sep 16, 2004 (San Diego, CA)Just returned from a two week trip to Europe and am very glad I didn't rely on Belkin Media Reader exclusively. Don't even think of trying this with anything larger than a 512mb card, and even then, it will drain your entire battery right in front of your eyes. The issue for me, however, was that I would occassionally get error messages stating "card read error, download aborted," or something to that effect. It would happen about 1/3 of the time, and in the middle of the upload (i.e., the first 30 pictures would go fine, then it would hang up at the same point each time). My guess is that I occassional used my Canon S500 to take small mpeg videos, and the Belkin reader couldn't handle those. If you have relatively small cards and stick to jpegs, you should be OK. Now, incidentally, the battery life of on my 4G ipod is only about 8 hours vs. the 12 hours advertised. Good idea, but not ready for prime time yet. Glad I was able to back up to CDs at Italian photo stores.