3. The Test and Verdict

I had no problems using the watch with my WinXP Home SP1 system with an empty folder for the drive appearing within seconds of my connecting the watch. The printed instruction sheet said that the flash drive should work fine with Mac OS 9 and higher (8.6 requires downloading a driver from Apple) and gives instructions for manually mounting the drive in Linux.

The mini-CD that came with the watch also contains a Win98 driver installer, user's manuals in English and Traditional and Simplified Chinese and UStorageTool application for Windows that allows partitioning the drive into public and password-protected private areas.

My tests consisted of creating a 124 MB folder of duplicated folders of JPEG images and drag-and-dropping it to and from my 2.4 GHz Pentium 4, Windows XP Home machine. Writing the folder to the watch took 4:01 minutes and reading it back took 2:52, which calculates to 0.51 MBytes / sec and 0.72 MBytes / sec respectively. Both values are well below the specs on the DiskGo's box of 920 kBytes / sec for writing and 1000 kBytes / sec for reading.

As a point of comparison, I grabbed one of the generic 32 MB flash drives that I got as a giveaway at a show and ran a quick file-copy test. The results of 0.28 write and 0.70 read MBytes / sec said the DiskGo's write speed was about twice as fast, but read speed was the same.

After getting an up-close-and-personal look at the DiskGo Watch drive, I guess I'd have to say I'll pass. The "casual" version is essentially disposable, since once the battery dies or band cracks and breaks, you'll be hard-pressed to replace either. And while the "dress" version lets you easily replace a broken band, it still suffers from the battery replacement problem. Its lack of built-in USB connection cable is also sure to result in "awshit" moments when the required cable has been left behind.

Too bad, though, since the concept is an appealing one, even if the implementation is flawed. If you do decide to go for it, be sure to hit the shopping comparison sites and even EDGE's own Buy Online links. At the time of review, I saw a couple of sites offering the 128 MB version for around $25 after rebates!