Introduction
One of the great features of todayis portable devices (such as your authoris recently acquired Palm i705) is that many of them support memory expansion via one of several media card formats. This opens up the possibility of being able to transfer data between the device and your Mac. But the variety of media card formats is also the bad news. In addition to Compact Flash, there are also Multimedia Card, Secure Digital, Memory Stick and Smart Media, to name the most popular.
How do you deal with all these different form factors?. Sure, one can get an adapter for any single format, but what to do when faced with all of them? You could carry around an adapter for each format, but what a pain in the neck, especially if you are on the road. If only there was an adapter that could read from and write to all of these different formats…
Documentation
The FlashGO! documentation consists of a few steps on the insert contained in the packaging, but this is about all that is necessary. It covers the three major steps involved in using the FlashGO! First is driver installation, which you probably wonit need to do. Second is how to install media adapters into the FlashGO! Third is how to plug the FlashGO! into your USB port.
Software
As mentioned, you probably wonit need to install any drivers in order to use the FlashGO! The system we tested on recognized the FlashGO! under both OS 9 and OS X. But a CD-ROM with drivers is included, in case you are running an older Mac or PC operating system.
Hardware
The hardware consists of the FlashGO! reader/writer, a light (1.21 oz.) small (0.62 in. high, 2.56 in. wide, and 3.73 in. deep) unit which has a USB plug on one end, an adapter slot on the other, and a green activity LED on top. The unit is thoughtfully designed so that if you have two USB ports, you can use the FlashGO! in one port, and still be able to use the adjacent USB port. There are also 3 media adapters, which plug into the FlashGO! adapter slot. Finally, thereis a 4 foot USB extension cable, in case you need to make a bit of a stretch.
The Three Media Adapters That Come with FlashGO!