Sunday, December 10, 2006

Gadget of the Week #5

The advent of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) was a lifesaver for many of us -- not because it is this great communications interface that replaced serial and parallel ports and enabled those wonderful hot-pluggable disk/flash drives, but because it provides a good power source to recharge the myriad of portable electronics that we seem to be carrying nowadays.

This week's gadget is a retractable USB adapter system from Gomadic which allows a single retractable USB cable to power all of my portable electronics through the use of swappable tips.

This sure beats my old system of different retractable cables for each device, although I think life would be much simpler for me as a user if they had standardized on the mini-USB connector to connect to the retractable cable, but I guess that would have made their plugs compatible with other cables.

As you can see, I've already gotten the connector for my new 4GB Clix so I don't have to carry around the proprietary IRiver cable (which wasn't even retractable).

One thing that was surprising was that there were no tips for Nokia devices. Not sure why as I have other USB based cable systems for charging Nokia phones. Seems like an interesting choice of vendor to not support.

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