Iomega Spices Up Portable Drives

The latest addition to the ever-expanding USB 2.0 thumbdrive universe is Iomega's $219 ScreenPlay, a 60GB hard drive designed not only to store multimedia content, but to play it back on any PC or TV. Here's what it looks like:



The pocket-size drive--one of numerous gadgets making their debut at the Digital Life show here in New York this weekend--comes with RCA and S-Video-out jacks, along with a cord for connecting to a PC or TV, a tiny remote, and an AC adapter.

Plug in the drive and it generates a menu through which you can browse photos, music, and movies. You can use the remote to navigate through, select, and play back content.

The AC adapter powers the drive when playing multimedia content on a TV. Iomega says this drive, due to ship later this month, should be handy for anyone interested in taking their multimedia library on the road for playback in a hotel, a friend's house, or a vacation home.

While the ScreenPlay supports most popular video formats, it does not support Windows Media video or audio, and only supports MP3 audio. The drive also supports VOB (the native DVD format), but it is not capable of playing back high-definition video. Another downside: if you want to connect the ScreenPlay to your stereo, you'll still need a TV or a PC to navigate the audio content.

Micro Mini

Iomega also showed off its latest micro-drive, the Micro Mini Hard Drive. It's also due to ship at the end of October in two capacities: 4GB for $129 and 8GB for $169. Both these drives are about half the size of a deck of cards. Here's one:



Iomega says these Micro Mini Hard Drives are faster than competing flash memory drives that are also typically more expensive per gigabyte. Iomega claims read and write speeds of 25 megabits per second for transferring data to and from the drive.