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Quick Question Before I pull The Trigger On A PDA

P

practal

Gawd
Joined
Jun 2, 2006
Messages
652
Im looking at a PDA that has a mini-USB port for synching. Can I hook an external 2.5" hard drive up and dump files to it from the PDA? I just need to transfer files from a 16GB SDHC card to a larger hard drive.

Im going to a music festival and plan on recording the 3 day event with my Canon HF-100. If I do it with just SD cards Im looking at $1K and Ill probably never use them again. Im thinking PDA is the cheapest route, as I already own a few external 2.5" drives. Laptop is also an option but Id like to keep it cheap as possible. Any other ideas would be appreciated.
 
The USB protocol requires a host device and a client device. Unless your PDA is able to act as a host to devices on its USB port, you probably can't do that.

I think there was an old NEC MobilePro PDA that had a USB port and could act as host, but I could be imagining.
 
Thanks for the help. Ive never dealt with PDAs so I was being hopeful. The other devices you linked to are nice but arent large enough for what I need. 1080p video eats up alot of space, 16GB=approximately 2 hours of video. I need to film about 18 hours a day for 3 days. This adds up to almost 450GB of storage space. I have two 250GB external 2.5" drives I picked up on clearance at BB awhile back. Im definatly covered on the storage, I just need something for the simple task of pulling the video from the sd card and transfering it to the hard drives.

It looks like I have a cheap $400 laptop or Asus EEE in my future unless someone has a any other advise. I thought about building a mini-itx Atom setup for less then $150 but a solution for a portable monitor would be to much of a hassle.
 
I'd strongly advise against getting a PDA. I used to own the best PDA on the market a few years ago. I thought it would be a great alternative to a laptop for some everyday computing. For the price of a decent PDA, you could get an EEE or an MSI Wind.

The EEE comes in a few flavors. 701, 900, and 901 (soon to be released in the US). The Wind is also soon to be released.

The 701/900 come with 900 Mhz celeries.

The 901 and the Wind come with 1.6 Ghz Atom (diamondville chip).

I think a big factor in a PDA or a laptop is battery life. PDAs have horrendous battery life. You'd think something so small wouldn't chew up batteries, right? Actually they do. The 901s and the Winds have been tested with Wifi on to have over 4.5 hours of battery life.

One test ran the 901 with full brightness, Wifi on and associated with an access point, bluetooth off, and a standard def movie playing until the battery died. It last 4.6 hours. Of course, it was using the power saving mode (which both the EEE and the Wind have). The power saving mode declocks the cpu to 800 Mhz. At standard 1.6 Ghz, the 901 got 3.8 hours of battery life under the same conditions. The Wind has similar times. Interestingly, super performance mode, which overclocks the chip to 1.8 Ghz, also came out with 3.8 hours of battery life under the same conditions.

I say wait a few for either of these netbooks. If you need one right this minute, than pick up the EEE 900. It has less battery life than the Atom based netbooks, but still more oomph than a PDA.
 
Ya the Eee will probably be much better for you in the long run with a full computer. You can't edit the video or anything but file transfer is perfect, plus a little Eee action in the style of email/web browsing never hurt.
 
eeepc is your best bet. Get the cheapest one and it'll cost less too. Just make sure you have an inverter to power it in the car unless you will have a room to plug it in at. You'll need a USB card reader too, I dont think they have the readers built in.
 
get a iphone or a pocketpc type mobile phone. Phone + pda in one. :)
 
MTXR said:
get a iphone or a pocketpc type mobile phone. Phone + pda in one. :)
Click to expand...

I don't think this is what he is looking for. He wants to record video on to an sd card and then quickly dump it to an external and just use a PDA or an EEE to do the transfer. I have an iphone and not only does it not have an SD card slot but Apple also does not let you use it in "disk mode" like the ipods.
 
Believe me when i say you don't want to use small devices to dump 16GB. It will take forever and use up all battery. Get a small laptop with real usb managment and a fast reader. I've tried a bunch of these and even ipod, just nightmare. You have to deal with all kinds of crap like errors, data corruption ect. Very bad. Get a laptop and burn stuff to media to be safe
 
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