Geeks.com sent me over a few of their gadgets for a review. As I don’t write for other publications as much anymore (I used to contribute to 3-4 sites, and 2 European printed magazines), I will introduce these products on my blog. These are not products that were randomly sent for a review, but I requested them myself, being curious as to how they would perform given that their prices are so accessible.

* Cavalry 500GB 3.5″ USB 2.0 Aluminum Ext Hard Drive

500 GB for just $115. My first drive was only 420 MBs, and that was just 13 years ago. How fast technology flies for some products. The Cavalry CAUM37500 is a USB 2.0 external hard drive that comes with its own power adapter, USB cable, and a stand. It was very easy to connect it to my PC and use it immediately. It comes pre-formatted with NTFS, which I personally found it to be a very nice, realistic, touch from the manufacturer. Of course, you can easily re-format the drive for other filesystems if desired. I tested successfully this drive with my video media, both as backup, and as a temporary storage for Sony Vegas. Worked like a charm. It felt very fast too, possibly faster than my primary 3-year old 120 GB drive on this DELL machine. The device is easily transportable and it even looks good. I am a happy camper with this drive, although my husband believes that we should reformat it as FAT32 and use it as an external drive for the Sony PS3, filled up with our home media files. Anyways, definitely deserves every penny.

* 3.5” LCD Digital Photo Frame w/SD-MMC Slot

At first glance, this digital photo frame looks pretty nice. And then, you turn it on. The quality of the screen is horrendous. The manufacturer claims 480×272 resolution (16:9), but I would put my hand in boiling water if this screen is anything more than 320×240 (4:3). In fact, it mostly feels like a 220×176 screen than anything else, as the pixels look huge in its 3.5″ 4:3 screen. However, the problem is not the resolution, as the quality of the screen itself. It seems that it’s not a TFT, but one of the cheaper LCD technologies with the slow refresh rate and few colors (it feels like 4096 colors). On the plus side, the device works. You put on it an SD card (up to 2 GB) and it will read all the images from the root folder of the SD card. There is manual and automatic slide-show every 5, 10 or 30 seconds (user selectable), and date show on the screen — if your JPEG has EXIF info on it. If you don’t mind the mediocre screen quality, then this is not a bad product. It’s not a fantastic product, in fact I find it very primitive, but hey, it displays pictures and it didn’t choke to any type of JPEG I fed it on.

* HB-10 Desktop Boom Microphone for PC

The HB-10 desktop boom microphone is a simple device. You connect its 8ft cord to the 3.5″ mic-in port of your sound card (or camcorder) and that’s all you have to do. I tried the product while chatting with my brother on Skype, and he assured me that I sounded loud and clear. The HB-10 can be used either with its base on the top of your desk, or by using its included smaller base that gets attached on the side of your monitor. This way the mic requires less space, but it’s possibly less flexible. This is a basic mic that won’t do professional recording, but it will do well for VoIP and IM. You can’t go wrong for $4.