Product Reviews

Laptop? Check. Camera? Check. Dangly USB memory card reader? Oh drat...

If you use a MacBook Pro the odds are that you don't want to have to haul around lots of extra bits of equipment all the time. Fortunately if you want to be able to read memory cards from your camera, PDA or mobile phone, now you don't need to pack yet another device and cable in your bag. Griffin's ExpressCard 34 Card Reader slots into the MacBook Pro's ExpressCard slot, turning it into a memory card reader slot without any external dangly bits to snag, break or forget.

This is a driver-free and hot-pluggable device, so it can be popped in and out whenever you like. (Okay, the memory cards it

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mounts in the Finder aren't hot-pluggable themselves; the Finder complains if you remove them without unmounting first, which is normal.) The card reader draws its power from the MacBook Pro itself, and we didn't notice any appreciable hit on battery life when we put it to the test. It runs at USB 2.0 speeds, in other words up to a theoretical 480Mbits/sec, so the data transfer performance will depend on the speed of the memory card you're using. That's going to be the performance bottleneck, not the device itself.

The card formats it handles directly are Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, SD, MMC, and xD. With an appropriate adaptor it can also work with Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick Micro, miniSD, microSD, RS-MMC, MMCplus, MMCmobile, MMCmini and MMCmicro. The only format of note that it doesn't handle at all is Compact Flash, and that's simply because those are wider than the whole Express Card slot itself.

The card fits right inside the Express Card slot and sits flush with the outer edge, so this is something you would probably leave inserted all the time, ready for use at any moment. It weighs a paltry 15g, so it is all good news. As long as you aren't a compact flash memory card user, in which case it is back to the old external readers for you.