Home > Consumer Reviews > Belkin Media Reader with Dock Connector for iPod (White)

I bought this unit for use with my 3G 15GB iPod. While it did work to transfer my SmartMedia cards, there are some major caveats for potential buyers. #1 - the battery life of the Belkin unit is low, download three session of a day or two of pictures (200 - 1MB files) and the batteries are dead, #2 - the transfer times are painfully slow ... that 200 files transfer took 20 minutes and that's without a clear indication about the progress or status, except the flickering light, and worst of all #3 - the connecting cable was subject to being jostled and losing connection, which resulted in corrupted files on the iPod (not fatal). The only way, I could get the unit to work prperly was to place it on a rock-stready hostel table and leave it alone. When I used it on a BritRail train table, the transfer was disrupted by slight jostles. And once when I had to try and pack up the unit in the middle of a transfer (emergency Underground stop) trying to maintain the connection while holding it was impossible.

I take a lot of pictures, and wanted to have some sort of high capacity storage solution. So, I bought one of these. It does what it is supposed to do, you plug it in, transfer the pictures, no more and no less. One of these combined with an iPod is a great solution for people on trips. You don't have to lug around a laptop. Both this media reader and the iPod fit in a pocket or small bag.

I bought this reader to download photos from my smartmedia camera because smartmedia only has 128MB cards. It works, mostly as advertised. It is no where near the speed of a USB 2.0 reader, but it transfers at a reasonable rate. My main issue is the incredibly poor manual that came with it. One inserts SmartMedia cards with the gold connector "up" and not "label side up" as the manual states.

Also, it takes a few seconds for the iPod to recognize the card, so don't be alarmed if it says "no card inserted" for a little bit.

Overall a pretty good product, if your camera doesn't support the apple connector, this will get the job done.

I found this product did what I needed it to do.
Over the course of two weeks, I downloaded 900+ pictures, each about 1MB in size, onto my iPod using this card reader. The largest download was 160 pictures. The uptake on my iPod was slow--it often took 1 minute to recognize that there was a card in the media reader, but the media reader and my iPod never hiccuped when once a download was started. The media reader still has the same set of batteries in it that it started with. And I made sure to recharge my iPod after every download.
Very satisfactory piece of equipment.

This worked fine (albeit slowly) with CF cards of up to 256 MB, but anything bigger, it repeatedly quit halfway through.

It's going back...