AT&T USBConnect Mercury – wireless cellular modem

Product summary

The good: The AT&T USBConnect Mercury is easy to use, and offers expandable memory. You can also get the cellular modem for free after rebates.

The bad: The SIM card and microSD expansion slots are in an inconvenient location. The modem doesn’t offer GPS capabilities. AT&T’s 3G coverage was spotty and the carrier charges higher overage fees than the competitors.

The bottom line: While the AT&T USBConnect Mercury is simple to use and can be had for free, it simply doesn’t offer the reliable coverage and faster speeds of the competition.

Price range: $99.99 check prices

• Reviewed by:
  Bonnie Cha
• Reviewed on: 07/31/2009

Just like the T-Mobile WebConnect USB, the Verizon Wireless USB760, and the Sierra Wireless 598U for Sprint, the AT&T USBConnect Mercury offers Internet connectivity on the go via cellular or Wi-Fi connection. Compact and simple, the portable modem is great for anyone who works on the road but, we’d recommend getting one of the aforementioned products before the USBConnect Mercury. Coverage could be spotty at times and download and upload speeds were often slow, which made it quite frustrating to use and not even worth the free price tag (with a two-year contract and after rebates). Also, like the other adapters, the AT&T USBConnect Mercury requires a data plan–$60 per month for 5GB of data–but be aware that AT&T charges $0.49 per MB for overage fees, which is considerably more than T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon.

Manufactured by Sierra Wireless, the AT&T USBConnect Mercury measures 2.6 inches tall by 1 inch wide by 0.7 inch deep and weighs just 1.2 ounces. To help you keep track of the little guy, AT&T ships the portable modem with a carrying strap that you can attach to the removable cap, which protects the USB connector, and then clip onto your body or bag. There’s an external antenna jack on the right side of the device, and on front, you’ll find two LEDs: the left one stays a solid blue when powered on and the right blinks or remains a solid orange or blue depending on network activity.

Like the others, the USBConnect Mercury is a plug-and-play solution that you can connect to your laptop just like a flash drive. In fact, the modem has a built-in microSD expansion slot so it can double as a storage device; AT&T has tested with up to 4GB cards but, according to Sierra Wireless, it can support up to 32GB. However, we weren’t so fond of the location of the expansion slot or the SIM card slot. Both sit right above the USB connector so it’s difficult to insert and remove either card just by hand. We much prefer the other carrier’s modem designs, which have the expansion slot located either on the side or bottom.

When you first connect the USBConnect Mercury to your laptop (compatible with machines running Windows Vista, XP and 2000; Mac OS 10.4.11 or later), it will automatically launch and install the necessary drivers and software to your computer. While there’s very little action required by the user, the installation process does take a while; in fact, AT&T notes in its documentation that it takes about 10 minutes.

Once installed and after restarting your computer, you should find the AT&T Communication Manager on your desktop. There you can connect to AT&T’s network or any available Wi-Fi networks. Like the T-Mobile WebConnect and Verizon Wireless USB760, you can also use the software to send, receive, and manage text messages with a cellular connection. The software interface is dead simple with two main tabs GSM or Wi-Fi. There are also options to manage your connections, set up a VPN, run diagnostics, and more. Unfortunately, the modem does not offer integrated GPS like the Sierra Wireless 598U.

The AT&T USBConnect Mercury supports the carrier’s EDGE (850/900/1,800/1,900MHz) and HSDPA (850/1,900/2,100MHz) networks; AT&T claims to have the fastest 3G network and says its typical download speeds range between 700Kbps and 1.7Mbps and upload speeds in the 500Kbps to 1.2Mbps range. However, when compared with the competing carriers’ offerings, we found the USBConnect Mercury to be the most frustrating to use because of the inconsistent coverage and pokey speeds.

We tested the modem on our Lenovo ThinkPad T61 throughout San Francisco, and the 3G coverage was really spotty and it wasn’t uncommon to have six bars of coverage one minute and then down to one or two bars the next. As we’ve done with other cellular modems, we ran tests using Speedtest.net and the USBConnect Mercury offered an average of 1.24Mbps for download speeds but a lowly 320Kbps for uploads. Perhaps more telling, with a signal strength of -70dbm, it took 2 minutes and 28 seconds for CNET’s site to fully load while CNN.com took 1 minute 30 seconds, ESPN.com 1 minute 40 seconds, and the NYTimes.com 1 minute 31 seconds. The T-Mobile WebConnect, Verizon Wireless USB760, and Sierra Wireless 598U for Sprint loaded all the same sites in 30 seconds or less. After having experienced better, we just can’t see a reason to choose the USBConnect Mercury over the others.

USB sticks replace old-school VHS tapes

Simple storage method evokes TV taping of the past

It might sound a touch Luddite, but a new digital video recorder from the UK that records to USB memory sticks could just be a deal-breaker for millions still stuck in old ruts.

The GiGo DV-DTR1 Digital Freeview recorder from Bedford-based Digital Vision is a standard digibox with a single tuner for free-to-air digital broadcasts.

EPG too

However, instead of packing an internal hard drive it can output recordings onto any external USB storage device. It can schedule these and pull data from the standard electronic programme guides.

Given that Digital Vision’s advertising shows USB sticks with paper labels indicating their content, it’s a safe bet to assume the machine will appeal to anyone used to VHS recording habits. A 2GB stick will hold about an hour of MPEG-2 TV recordings.

Get it at Tesco

So far, we don’t know much beyond the scant details on the under-construction website, although sources say Tesco will be selling the DTR1 for £70 in September.

Via Everything USB

USB sticks replace old-school VHS tapes

Simple storage method evokes TV taping of the past

It might sound a touch Luddite, but a new digital video recorder from the UK that records to USB memory sticks could just be a deal-breaker for millions still stuck in old ruts.

The GiGo DV-DTR1 Digital Freeview recorder from Bedford-based Digital Vision is a standard digibox with a single tuner for free-to-air digital broadcasts.

EPG too

However, instead of packing an internal hard drive it can output recordings onto any external USB storage device. It can schedule these and pull data from the standard electronic programme guides.

Given that Digital Vision’s advertising shows USB sticks with paper labels indicating their content, it’s a safe bet to assume the machine will appeal to anyone used to VHS recording habits. A 2GB stick will hold about an hour of MPEG-2 TV recordings.

Get it at Tesco

So far, we don’t know much beyond the scant details on the under-construction website, although sources say Tesco will be selling the DTR1 for £70 in September.

Via Everything USB

Hauppauge WinTV-MiniStick HD review

No Freeview HD but remains a passable way to view DTT channels on your desktop

Sadly this tuner can’t do UK HD but it handles Freeview well

Slapping a vogue-ish phrase like HD on the WinTV-Ministick is a sure way to attract interest in your DTT tuner but it can be misleading for UK buyers.

While tuners like the Ministick are indeed compatible with terrestrial HD services from countries including France and Spain which use H.264 compression, they lack the DVB-T2 chipsets that will be required for Freeview HD. Indeed, DVB-T2 tuners are not likely to appear in commercial products until late 2009 at the earliest and will likely come at a premium price initially.

So for those not planning to hop across The Channel, how suitable is the single DVB-T tuner-equipped Ministick for standard-definition reception? Well, being little bigger than a stick of gum, it’s not the tiniest tuner we’ve come across but is slender nonetheless.

It plugs directly into a USB 2.0 port on your computer or can be set apart using a USB extension cable. Also included is an adjustable hinged portable aerial fitted with a magnetic base or you can connect the tuner to a rooftop aerial.

Predictably, the latter proves the best option as we were unable to get a signal in our London test area with the portable option either indoors or sat in the garden with the included signal monitor application showing figures stuck stubbornly in the red. Not great for on-the-go laptop users, then.

Also in the box is a basic credit card-sized remote which could do with some variation in button size to make it more intuitive. The tuner works well with Windows Media Center (with Service Pack 2 installed) or you can use the supplied alternative – version 7 of Hauppauge’s also rather basic WinTV application. There’s no support for the third-party TVTV application, however, which would have added such features as remote recording.

The software scans for channels on first loading, generating a single list from which channels can be searched for by name. This displays video in a re-sizeable Windows Media Player-style interface with the option to have it always overlaid over other items on your desktop and display video in 4:3, 16:9 or 16:10 including full-screen.

There’s subtitle support but not teletext. You can view now-and-next data for channels from the main application or there’s a grid-styled EPG populated by seven-day DVB data from which you can also view synopses and schedule recordings.

Recordings are also scheduled from a separate manual scheduler where you can specify channel, length and once, daily or weekly repeat options with the option to have the PC come out of standby to record if needed.

Alternatively, you can start recording directly from the main application window. Recordings are stored with their name, date and time in transport stream format, although Hauppauge has stopped short of including software for editing, conversion or burning afterwards.

The software keeps a running cache of what you’re viewing in its pause buffer, allowing you to skip back and forward 10 or 30 seconds or in one-minute chunks. Buffered files can kept too (useful if you forgot to record what you’re watching).

While we were not in a position to test its HD reception capabilities, viewing Freeview channels and playing back recordings on our reasonably powerful test laptop (Intel Core 2, 2GB RAM, GeForceT5600 graphics card) using a rooftop aerial proved a smooth experience with few glitches. Recordings also started on time with no hiccoughs.

OCZ Throttle eSATA Flash Drive 32GB Review

Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to have an eight, 16, or even 32GB memory stick that you take everywhere with you so that your entire music collection, many of your pictures and a fair selection of videos, work files, etc are close at hand. However, when it comes to moving your files around, copying gigabytes of data over a USB connection can take a long time. Enter, then, the OCZ Throttle.

While it may look like any other USB memory stick, the Throttle has an eSATA connector, allowing for faster transfers to and from the stick. How much faster? Well, the maximum data rate of USB is theoretically 60MB/s but in most practical instances you seldom get much over 30MB/s and more often it will be around 25MB/s. In contrast, OCZ claims the Throttle can be read from at up 90MB/s and written to at 30MB/s. Okay, so the write performance may not be amazing but the increase in read performance is enough to colour us very interested.

The stick comes in a modest little cardboard box along with a USB-to-miniUSB cable and that’s it. Given it’s essentially just a memory stick, this is hardly surprising or disappointing though. The miniUSB cable is used to provide power to the drive when it’s connected to a non-powered eSATA port and also for connecting the drive as a normal USB 2.0 drive for those situations where no eSATA port is available.

The need for this cable does highlight one of the Throttle’s problems. Namely, it’s somewhat annoying to have to carry around an extra cable with the drive, in case either of the above scenarios arises. There’s no particularly easy answer to this problem, except to have some sort of integrated USB cable like the Lenovo ThinkPad portable hard drive but this would add to the overall bulk considerably. It’s something we’d like to see OCZ experiment with, though.

Another issue with this drive is its bulk (80mm x 20mm x 10mm) and in particular its width at its plug-end (18mm x 10mm). This can make it difficult to fit in alongside other peripherals that tend to populate the back panel of a computer. Further concern comes from the cap that covers the eSATA port as it’s untethered (and can’t be clipped onto the back) so will no doubt end up the same way 90 per cent of USB stick caps do – lost or discarded. One final point – more of an observation than a problem – is the drives lack of ruggedisation; it probably won’t handle exposure to water or the soul of a size 12 boot, too well. All told, there are certainly some design points that OCZ might want to address or incorporate in the next version.

For the most part, though, the mere prospect of nearly tripling transfer speeds will be all that concerns you so as such, let’s take a look at how the Throttle drive performs.

While there is potential to use this drive as the system drive for a computer (using it as the installation drive for freeNAS springs to mind) or using it as a ReadyBoost drive for Windows Vista, we feel it’s not really the kind of drive you should be using for such applications – there are plenty of small, low price, dedicated SSDs that are more suitable. Therefore we won’t be looking at performance under such conditions.

Instead, the key issue is how this thing holds up when it comes to file transfers. To test this we plugged the drive into our test bed using the eSATA connector and transferred video files (totalling 3.26GB) from the system hard drive (a Western Digital Raptor X) to the Throttle and timed how long it took. We then reversed the process and read the files from the Throttle and wrote them to the hard drive. We then repeated both tests three times (deleting the files and rebooting the PC between each run) to ensure each time was consistent. After this, we used the Throttle’s USB 2.0 connection and repeated all six tests.

The speed difference is clear, with the Throttle over 250 per cent faster when reading over eSATA rather than USB. Likewise, it is over 80 per cent faster when writing over eSATA. These really are compelling figures that alone would be enough to convince us to fork out the extra cash for this drive.

Still, we wanted to be doubly sure its performance held up under more than one test with one data type, so we repeated the testing methodology but replaced the nine video files with 3,595 mixed files (including images, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and Powerpoint presentations) spanning 506 folders and totalling 3.11GB.

What’s immediately obvious is how much longer it takes to copy across many small files rather than a few large ones. This is something we’d expect to see, but we didn’t imagine the difference would be quite so dramatic. On top of this, the write test over USB absolutely skyrocketed, taking a whopping 5mins 56secs compared to just 2mins 44seconds over eSATA.

So performance is not only as good as we’d hoped; it’s actually better. The only other consideration, then, is the price and here OCZ is pretty competitive. While you can get 32GB USB flash drives for as little £50, most seem to be around £60, so we feel its excellent transfer speeds justify the £20 or so premium. Furthermore, if you don’t need quite so much as 32GB, the 8GB and 16GB models are available for just £27 and £45, respectively, so you certainly shouldn’t need to break the bank to get a high-speed portable storage device.

Author
Edward Chester
Manufacturer
OCZ
Supplier
LambdaTek
Price
£66.88 (Exc VAT)
as reviewed
£76.91 (Inc VAT)

Samsung YP-U5 (2GB) Review

Six months or so after releasing its YP-U4 ‘Litmus’, Samsung is back for another crack at the Shuffle-sized Mp3 player market with a new player, rather unimaginatively named the YP-U5. Looking back, I’ve a soft spot for this one’s predecessor. While spoilt by average sound quality and a mediocre battery life, it was a nicely designed and very usable player, putting the vast majority of its competitors to shame on several counts. The U4 was extremely compact, made effective use of a tiny screen and had surprisingly practical controls.

All of which makes it a little odd that Samsung has junked so many elements of the design with its replacement.

Out, for a start, goes the colour graduated finish, in favour of a range of solid colours – red, white, pink or black. The unit is marginally narrower and thinner, but a couple of millimetres longer, and the clever slide-out USB connection of the original has now been swapped for a more conventional USB connector covered by a pop-off cap. Strangely enough, while the U5 is the new and improved version of the U4, it actually feels like a more conservative product.

Still, the all-plastic construction feels good and solid, and it’s arguable that the standard USB plug fitted here offers a more robust connection than the slimmed down, coverless plug sported by the old U4. I suspect that might be the reason for the change.

Switch the U5 on and it’s much easier to see the similarities between it and last year’s model. The screen, a 1in, four line, 128 x 64 pixel OLED affair, is identical to the old version’s, and while the touch-sensitive D-pad of the U5 has been replaced by a tilting, white directional ring surrounding a physical pause/play button, the player operates in much the same way.

The ‘back’ button is now mounted on the top of the unit (viewed horizontally) along with a context-sensitive function button, which does various things depending on what mode you have the U5 in. Volume is adjusted using the up and down directions on the white ring. The only other control is a dual function power toggle/lock button on the bottom of the unit, and it’s this that brings me to one of my few complaints about usability. It’s all too easy to accidentally engage the lock while you’re trying to use the top mounted buttons, which is a small but irritating nuisance during everyday use.

As with the U4, Samsung seems hell-bent on giving you some kind of cool audio/visual experience from a tiny screen. With the previous player we had an almost unrecognisable, miniature monochrome simulacrum of the album cover art during playback, plus a range of animations when you flick between functions on the main menu screen or scroll through option screens, each accompanied by a cheerful little noise.

The U5 has all this stuff, but goes one better with a tiny animated character, labelled ‘Popcon’, who turns up to greet you when you first switch on the player, then dances manically on the left of the ‘now playing’ screen to any tracks where you don’t have album art to, erm, enjoy.

I can’t say that this sort of Tamagotchi nonsense floats my boat, but there’s no question that Samsung has pulled out all the stops to make Popcon a feature, giving you a wide range of cheerful bitmap characters to choose from, and allowing you to name them if you wish. Still, if it’s a bizarre inclusion, it’s not one that has any negative impact on the user experience which is – as with the U4 – very good. Some of us might miss things like on the fly playlist creation, but you can enable gapless playback, and navigation by file browser or the usual ID Tag methods is simplicity itself.

Functionally the U5 has a little more to offer than the average player of this size, though again Samsung seems to be taking a slightly quirky approach. We still get an FM radio with auto presets, a decent little voice recorder and a podcast function, but Samsung has now thrown in a weird Fitness function. Choose an activity from the list (Walking, Running, Hiking, Yoga etc) to do while you’re listening to your player, and the U5 tells you how long you’ve been doing it for and how many calories it thinks you will have burned in the meantime. You can set your body weight and inform the U5 of your daily fitness goals and it will then track your progress day to day, with able help from your ever lovable Popcon.

Again, I can’t see this of being much importance to the average TR reader, but it’s the sort of cute touch that might make the player more appealing to a wider audience. In fact, when you consider that players like this are often sold for use during gym workouts or while jogging, it all makes a certain amount of sense. One thing that doesn’t is that the radio still won’t let you autotune the presets from within the radio function itself. You still have to go outside to the Settings menu and do it from there.

The old U4 was a bit of a disappointment when it came to audio quality. The U5 is an improvement, but – despite Samsung’s trumpeting of its DNSe 3.0 enhancement technology – not a vast one. The variant of DNSe used here is labelled ‘core’, hinting that it doesn’t offer the full power of the version used in the excellent YP-P3 player, and while it still features a processing enhancement designed to restore audio data lost through compression, along with a range of EQ settings, a bass boost function and a 3D effect, the overall result isn’t nearly so impressive.

Bass response is very good, with the U5 dishing out a warm, well defined range of low-end tones and enough power that – with a half-decent pair of headphones – you won’t want to use the bass enhancement function in anger, or you’ll just get a nasty, booming mess

The U5 is also a fine performer at the other end of the audio spectrum; you might find the highs slightly too bright for comfort, but there’s plenty of detail. What’s more, with the 3D effect kept low or switched off, there’s a nice sense of space, with individual instruments clearly positioned across the stereo range.

The problems come with the mid-range. That all-important mid sounds slightly weak, thin and muffled, and that’s enough to put the U5 behind the Sandisk Sansa Clip and even the iPod shuffle in the sound quality stakes. How serious this is will depend on the headphones you’re using and the music you’re listening to. The output actually seems quite well suited to the cheap and cheerful buds thrown in the box, though needless to say these won’t satisfy anyone who is particular about audio quality.

Some genres of music aren’t too badly affected. Levees, from Terence Blanchards orchestrated Jazz album, A Tale of God’s Will, sounded fine, the subdued acoustic bass and melancholy, muted trumpet tones having no problems cutting through the funereal strings running through the early and latter sections of the piece. There was also some nice detailing in the piano, percussion and brass that come in midway through.

While the vocals in tracks from Ray LaMontagne’s Gossip in the Grain suffered from the lack of mid-range clarity, the Samsung still delivered a warm, intimate, no-fuss sound. Bass heavy dance tracks like Justice’s Genesis also work well, playing to the YP-U5′s strengths, and I didn’t get bad results from more poppy material from Justin Timberlake, Maroon 5 or Take That.

Rock tracks, however, particularly those with layered heavy guitars and busy drums, have a tendency to sound messy. It’s hard to make out what’s going on for large sections of Mastodon’s Oblivion, and the thick guitar sounds of The Hold Steady’s Sequestered in Memphis have definitely sounded more punchy and urgent. And forget about switching from the Norm or Auto EQ settings to the Rock preset (or, God forbid, Concert Hall) – you’ll only make things worse.

It’s a shame, because in all other respects the U5 is a very nice player, and a worthy rival to the Sansa Clip (still the thinking man’s small format MP3 player of choice). Battery life, at around 20 hours, is very good, and File Format support, with OGG and FLAC now provided, is certainly above average.

Even the pricing is competitive; I can’t imagine anyone paying £30 for the 2GB version when the 4GB version is only £8 more, but you’re still getting a lot of player for that kind of money. If your tastes run more to pop and dance than rock, then the YP-U5 well worth a look. If, however, you want a great all-rounder that can handle any type of music, then Samsung’s latest little wonder falls slightly – just slightly – short of the mark

I tried the U5 with a range of other ‘phones, including the Grado SR60s and iGrados, the Denon AHC551s and a set of Klipsch Custom 2s, and the weak mid-range was apparent across all of them.

Author
Stuart Andrews

Published
5th Jul 2009

Manufacturer
Samsung

Supplier
Play

Price
£26.08 (Exc VAT)

as reviewed
£29.99 (Inc VAT)

Videk USB Display Adapter review

Get a second display without needing a second graphics card

Videk’s USB-to-DVI converter brings dual displays to the masses

UK supplier Videk’s USB-to-DVI adaptor got in our good graces immediately by bundling in a DVI-to-VGA adaptor. A USB cable and Windows driver disc was included too, which was handy as the drivers available on DisplayLink’s website were no good.

We loaded the software into Vista and had our second display up and running straight away. Hardware acceleration is supported, meaning that frame rates during low-level gaming and HD movies were smooth enough to tolerate.

Unfortunately, our attempts to use the adaptor with XP were a failure. The software installation caused our PC to completely forget our graphics card’s drivers. The problem was fixed with a reinstall of Nvidia’s drivers, but it was a disappointing turn of events.

Mac compatibility was flawless though, making the adaptor a bit of a mixed bag overall. The XP experience is a shame, but when used on the more modern OSes, it’s a great option.

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Digital Britain: the verdict

Lord Carter’s report is sensible but not revolutionary

Let’s get the obvious bit out of the way first: expecting ISPs to act as policemen is a terrible idea, but at least Digital Britain hasn’t listened to the loonies and suggested kicking file-sharers off the net altogether.

If we were to describe Lord Carter’s report in one word, it’d be “sensible”. There’s nothing here that’ll make you jump with joy, but there are plenty of sensible ideas in there.

The overriding theme of Digital Britain is inclusion – so there’s £200 million to help pay for the cost of delivering broadband to everyone, a small levy on phone lines to ensure that people outside cities aren’t left drooling when everyone else gets super-fast broadband, and a commitment to ensure that when government services go online people who can’t or won’t access such services won’t be left out.

The report also recognises that supply and demand go together, so it proposes working with the BBC to roll out better DAB radio coverage and ensuring that all our major radio stations are DAB-only by 2015 – but it also proposes working with manufacturers to ensure cheap DAB radios are widely available by then, and with car firms to ensure that cars come fitted with DAB receivers by default.

Broadband as a utility

Similarly the report suggests encouraging house builders to think about broadband as just another utility, factoring it into their plans in the same way they’d factor in electricity, gas and water.

It’s good to see the government belatedly realise that we have a games industry too, and that the industry is worried about other countries’ tax incentives leeching the UK of its best development talent. We’d have preferred a commitment to tax relief instead of committing to “review the evidence” for one, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

What about file sharing? The report appears to have dumped the idea of a broadband tax to pay for a new and exciting rights agency, but it does compel ISPs to send nastygrams to file sharers and to hand over people’s details if the entertainment industries ask them to.

The small print is crucial here: if ISPs adopt those measures and everybody’s still downloading like demons, Ofcom may then compel ISPs to block, throttle and generally bugger about with offenders’ internet access. That’s some way off, though, and it’s good to see the “three strikes and you’re off the net” idea given all the attention it deserves, ie: none.

Balanced demands

Overall, then, we don’t think Digital Britain is going to have anybody dancing in the street – but Lord Carter has done a good job of balancing the demands of the copyright lobby with the rights of ordinary internet users, and he’s come up with some smart ways to finance broadband and DAB without asking a near-bankrupt government for big piles of cash.

Digital Britain may not be as revolutionary as some people might have liked – but it’s nowhere near as bad as many of us feared.

If reports are true and Lord Carter’s off to the private sector as soon as Digital Britain’s PDF is posted, he’s not going to be leaving with an angry mob in hot pursuit

Traxdata USB Player review

Is Traxdata’s USB Player an easy way to access you digital media?

Once the sole preserve of computers, multimedia playback is now a common feature in everything from receivers to games consoles.

Even TVs have it built in these days, but if you don’t have one of those and cannot plug your computer into your existing set perhaps, then you can use an adapter like the USB Player.

About the size of the average portable HDD and clad in shiny black to complement most TVs, the Player plays back media from USB-connected sticks and NTFS/FAT 32 formatted hard discs.

A blue operating light adorns the front but the rear is where you plug your USB device. But there’s only one port and it’s too close to the HDMI, making it impossible for the Player to accommodate chunkier flash drives. You also get component and combined composite/phono outputs (leads are provided, plus a Scart adapter) and a coaxial digital audio output and the device is powered by a 5V adapter.

A projector-style remote does the job well enough but could do with a few more distinct buttons.

The software is relatively basic – you can view files as a list (folders are supported) or as thumbnails and boost the menu resolution to 1080i.

The Player handles most popular formats including DivX, XviD, MP4, VCD, MPEG-2, DVD image files (menus included), most subtitle file types, MP3, WAV and JPEGs. There’s no HD playback but video files can be outputted as interlaced, progressive or upscaled via component or HDMI to 720p or 1080i.

You can fast-forward and rewind them at up to 16x normal speed, slow them down to x1/8 or skip to a desired point by entering the required time.

Add to this playlists and the ability to create JPEG slideshows accompanied by your own music.

Playback performance compared favourably with other devices such as our Xbox 360, with decent sound and image quality via HDMI and component and predictably softer images via composite. But upscaling XviD files with resolutions in the 640 x 480 range via HDMI to 1080i delivered only incremental discernible improvements when seen on our 42in Panasonic plasma.

Build issues aside, the Traxdata is a neat plug-and-play solution for bringing multimedia to your TV.

Elgato Turbo.264 HD review

Fast video encoding for Apple TV and more, with editing from AVCHD camcorders

Elgato’s original Turbo.264 impressed everyone. Like this new model, it was a small USB dongle containing a dedicated co-processor for encoding video into the H.264 format that has become the standard for iPods, the Apple TV, Blu-ray, and modern, flash storage-based DV cameras.

It only did standard-definition, however, and in the couple of years since its launch, high-definition (HD) has become more popular.

Step forward, then, the Turbo.264 HD, a version that will encode all the way to full 1080p HD. “But I’ve got a Mac Pro,” you think, you lucky swine. Doesn’t matter; using Handbrake, our quad-core 2.66GHz Mac Pro encoded a 43-minute, 720p movie in almost real time, but the Turbo.264 HD slashed that encoding time to just over 18 minutes.

Best of all, the Mac Pro’s processors were maxed out during the Handbrake encode, while the Turbo.264 HD’s shouldering of much of the grunt-work left half the capacity free during its encode, letting you get on with other stuff.

The software is good; just drop in your source video files – there is tons of supported formats – pick the output type and click Start. You can create your own presets, and it will add the resulting video either to iTunes or upload it directly to YouTube for you.

It works directly with AVCHD camcorders, too, letting you view, trim, and join movies together quickly and efficiently