Digital Home Thoughts: BenQ Introduces Portable CD, DVD Burners

"BenQ is preparing a new range of optical disc-based portable storage products with plans to introduce the first in the line in September, the company says. The Pocket Writer products will play and record 3.2-inch optical discs, but not the more common 4.7-inch discs. Three versions are planned; mock-ups were shown at a Taipei news conference. The PW100 will be compatible with CD, the PW200 with DVD, and the PW300 with Blu-ray Disc, says Jennifer Ho, a representative of BenQ's storage division. All of the products will support USB On The Go, also known as USB host mode. With this technology, users can plug in USB-compatible devices such as digital still cameras and video cameras and transfer data directly onto the optical disc without the need to send it via a personal computer. The drives will read Compact Flash, Secure Digital (SD), MiniSD, MultiMediaCard (MMC), or Memory Stick memory cards. The PW200-model will also have a Bluetooth wireless connection."

The choice not to support the 4.7-inch discs is a little confusing as you can pretty much buy them almost anywhere and I guess smaller is better but you'd hate to need an extra disc and not be able to find it in the middle of nowhere (like Canada for example :twisted: ). One interesting choice is the PW200 with its built in bluetooth. I'm not sure what kind of throughput it gets, but it would be nice to connect it to computers and other devices without having to find a USB cable.