13, Jan, 2025
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PocketZip PG Carp Drive

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It’s taken a while, but Iomega’s 4OM Clik disk — recently rebranded as PocketZip — seems to have finally found its raison d’etre. Clik never achieved the widespread OEM adoption that the company had hoped for.
It fell to Iomega’s HipZip digital music player to turn the palm-sized diskette into something more than a novelty. At about $30 each, the PocketZip platters allow you to save more music per dollar than the solid-state wafers, such as Compact-Flash and SmartMedia cards, used by most digital audio devices.
However, the HipZip’s other talent is that it doubles as a storage drive. Plug it into the USB port of any Windows or Mac machine and you have a quick, highly portable way to move files — up to 40M — between PCs.
The PocketZip PC Card Drive refines this concept with an eye on the notebook market. APC discovered that it’s basically a repackaging of the original Clik PC Card Drive. However, this doesn’t detract from the PocketZip’s allure.
A PocketZip disk (one is supplied in the package) slides neatly into a PC Card shell, which in turn slips into a notebook’s PC Card slot. Windows Me correctly identified the device and loaded drivers native to the OS and the drive 7 immediately appeared 7 in Windows Explorer.
Installing the included lomega-Ware software adds a QuickSync backup utility
and the typical right-click menu options, as well as an appropriate icon in My Computer. Disappointingly, the drive runs only on Windows. In APCs tests, a 10M file shuttled between disk and desktop in just under three seconds. The drive spins down into sleep mode three seconds after it’s last used, so the impact on notebook battery life is minimal. On its own, the PocketZip PC Card Drive is a nifty solution for sharing files between Windows notebooks. If you own a HipZip player, you get the bonus of being able to
effortlessly load music onto a handful of PocketZip disks, directly from your notebook, without having to fiddle with USB hookups or even having the player at hand.
However, when it comes to convenience, PocketZip isn’t the only game in town. APC is still enamoured of USB minidrives such as IBM’s Memory Key (see APC April, page 42). It’s not as cheap if you want an easily expandable 40M at your fingertips, but it’s more than enough for putting essential documents, images and drivers in your pocket.

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