So I finally settled on and purchased my new media player / card reader. Its an mPack P800 by PQI (yeah, I hadn’t heard of them at all either). I did a LOT of research to find one that did exactly what I wanted. The biggest thing I wanted it to do was play MP3s with playlists and display CR2 Canon RAW files on screen with their EXIF data. It sounded so simple in concept but it took nearly three weeks of constant review to finally find one that did it all.
Its a little cumbersome and a little slow, but it does everything I wanted. It even charges off the USB bus and mounts on the computer as a standard external hard drive. Its got an 80 GB HD so I shouldn’t have any problems with storage, and if worse comes to worse I can swap it out with a larger drive as they become available (though there is a sticker on it that specifically states: “Warning! Do not open this device. Not user-servicable part inside.”). I’ve already read of people swapping out the drive for 100gb drives. I don’t think I’ll need to do that for a while though. We’ll see once I get all my photos on it.
I’ll keep you informed as to my continuing opinion of it. Unfortunately, if I don’t like it, its got a 15% restocking fee. I’d better damn well like it.
