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Non-Tech : Iomega Thread without Iomega -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gottfried who wrote (4307)	11/18/1998 4:06:00 AM
From: Philip J. Davis	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 10072

Sorry for posting so late. Flew into LA from Las Vegas a few hours ago and it took me some time to upload pictures. The day began at 9am and I took a trip over to the Sony booth. Naturally, the questions I wanted answered were when HiFD would ship and whether HiFD was in fact, backwards compatible. Here's what happened: I first asked the Sony rep when HiFD would ship. She told me that HiFD would ship at the end of this month (November). I then asked for a demonstration of HiFD's backward compatibility with a 1.44MB disk. Judging from the reaction to this question and all the sudden activity it generated, it was apparent that I had asked a touchy question. The sales rep looked worried and immediately excused herself, upon which an older woman appeared and wanted to know what it was that I wanted. I repeated that I wanted for a demonstration of HiFD's backward compatibility. She replied that, unfortunately, they had no 1.44MB disks there, and unfortunately, could not accommodate me. I replied that I just happened to have one handy and whipped out a crisp, new 1.44MB floppy diskette that had been handed to me by a Sony rep demonstrating the Mavica digital camera (she had taken a picture of me). Another Sony rep immediately approached (now I had three nervous sales reps surrounding me) and told me that they could not use my diskette for fear of a "virus". I thanked her for the "demonstration" and then left the Sony booth. I then proceeded to the TEAC booth. There, I asked the same questions. Their response: The TEAC HiFD will ship in February 1999 and no, they wouldn't demonstrate it's backwards compatibility. One thing I did notice was that the TEAC HiFD packaging that was displayed at the booth indicated a transfer rate of 3.6MB/sec while at the same time saying "External with Parallel Port". Is this even possible? Next stop: Castlewood Systems. I approached the first sales rep I met there and asked when Orb would ship. She replied that the internal version was now shipping to selected OEM's. I asked which ones, whereupon she pointed to six computers grouped together. I went over to them and indeed, six Orb drives were installed within six different OEM machines. The only familiar machine that I noted was Deawoo. The others were: NSpire Systems, Supercom, PowMem, ProView, and Pionex. I then asked when the drive would ship at retail. Words came out of her mouth, but she failed to answer the question. It was then that I met an employee from Iomega that was also checking out Orb. Comparing notes, we obtained the spec sheet for the PP version of Orb. We both noted that for "data transfer rate", the Orb had listed the figure of 2MB/sec. Attached to this figure were two asterisks. They corresponded to a note at the bottom that read: "Port speed is controlled by the PC bus. Maximum bus speed is typically 10-20 Mhz. Orb is designed to transfer data at the maximum rate of your PC's PP bus speed. Actual transfer rate is dependent on your system configuration and bus performance." We then asked whether we could take a look at the disks themselves. We were told that no, we couldn't but that we could look at a few that were encased in plexiglass. Interestingly, the ONLY orb drive we could look at was internal version. All the external Orb drives, including one that was translucent, were all encased in plexiglass. I went back to the Imation booth to settle once and for all, whether the iMac SuperDisk drive is compatible with PC's. The Imation rep told me that while it was technically feasible for the iMac Superdisk drive to work with a PC, Imation had not written any drivers for Windows 95/98, and thus as far as Imation was concerned, iMac was NOT compatible with PC's. My final stop was at the NEC booth. I wanted to see whether they had the USB Clik! drive in a prominent display connected to NEC's new MobilePro 800 handheld PC. In fact, it was. I asked when the USB Clik! drive would ship and was told that it would be anywhere from the end of the 1st quarter to the beginning of 2nd quarter, 1999. OK....now here are the pictures: Sony's HiFD geocities.com TEAC's HiFD geocities.com TEAC HiFD packaging geocities.com Microtek Scanner with Zip built-in geocities.com Stryker Endoscopy Digital Capture System with Zip built-in geocities.com Digicart II Digital Audio Recorder with Zip built-in geocities.com USB Clik! drive connected to MobilePro 800 Hand Held PC geocities.com Internal Orb drive geocities.com Translucent External Orb drive geocities.com Deawoo OEM with internal Orb drive geocities.com Orb packaging geocities.com Closeup of External Orb drive geocities.com SyQuest ad for USB SparQ on the rear of a taxi outside of Comdex geocities.com regards, Philip