Just received my Coolwalker today - I ordered it months ago from the specifications. Thought I'd share with you the O.O.B.E. - Out Of Box Experience.

It's well packed in it's box - plenty of pieces - the coolwalker, a pouch, neck strap, recharger, USB cable (really short - 60cm?), video cable, remote control, manual and CD.

It's a bit bigger that I imagined - slightly smaller than a Mark 1 Game Boy - so it looks a bit clunky. The screen is OK, but only about 1/4 of the frontal area - 4 x 5 cm.

Top has a floppy rubber flap covering up power, USB and video connections. Bottom has a sliding door revealing the CF slot. The front has a navigation pad and three buttons.

Switched it right on - hold down the power switch for a few seconds to power on - a nice touch to stop accidently switching it on. Boots up in about 5 seconds.

Immediately stuck by how simple the user interface is - it works well, but really does not impress visually. Hopefully this will be legible in daylight.

Imediately popped in a CF card and the menu asks what to do - so selected copy CF to HDD. About 10 minutes later I had transferred 140 .NEF files to the Harddisk - copying the same card to my PC takes around half that time. I guess it is quick enough. Though the progress bar is in 20% steps, so I thought it had crashed the first time I did this.

After copying you can see the image thumbnails - 9 per screen - it's really a bit too small - particularly for portrait mode photos as they are smaller still. Would be better to have the possibility of 4 thumbnails - I'll have to read the manual later..

Scrolling down through the thumbnails pauses to redraw each screen full of 9 images, so is rather erratic.

Selecting an image to see fullscreen is done simply by pressing on enter. The image information, histogram etc overlay the image with white text. Similar details to the D70. To skip to the next image, the screen goes black for about 7 seconds.

Loading and zooming one image is reasonably quick. What I don't like / haven't found, is how to hide the menu items that partially overlay the images - this is still the case with slideshow which is just plain ugly.

After a few minutes the unit is quite warm, but certainly not hot.

Plug in the USB cable and nothing happens - you have to power off / on to activate the connection.

When connected the screen displays - USB Connection and the buttons do nothing. The PC recognises the CF card as a removable disk - so far the internal disk has not appeared.???

Once connected to the computer, you cannot switch off the coolwalker via it's powerswitch. Just pull out the USB cable then the normal menu appears and the Coolwalker can then be used normally.

Just figured out - the Coolwalker shows EITHER the CF Card or the internal disk as a removable drive on the PC. Copying the same 140 image from the Coolwalker disk to my PC takes around 2 minutes, so quite a good speed.

Slideshow: A number of images can be marked for a slideshow, or a single folder, or all folders. The slideshow shows each selected image with two large ugly icons - MENU and PAUSE ( II ) overlying the bottom of the image - not nice to look at at all. There must be some way to hide these - I certainly cannot recommend the coolwalker to anyone who wants to use this as a small digital picture frame.

Slideshow via TV - oh this is bad - I mean what is the point in making a terrible quality TV image - I have a reasonable PAL format TV and the images are blurry / blocky - probably only about 1/4 VGA resolution so, don't think of using the Coolwalker to share pictures using their TV - it's really horrible - poor quality and still the awful menu overlaying the images.

On the plus side, there is a nice little remote control that repeats the functions of the Coolwalker.

So what do I think. I really don't know, it certainly fulfils the promise for somewhere to save the pictures when not travelling with the laptop, but since I ordered the Coolwalker in June I have bought an extra 1.5Gb in CF cards, so don't need it as much. I have yet to try using it to organise photos, I suspect that doing this from a PC will be very much simpler. As for using this as a photo wallet / slide show - it is really awful. As an extrnal HDD it is quick and quiet, but certainly not cheap.

I encourage anyone considering this kit to really think about what they want it for.

I'll use it in the field soon and post some more comments then.

best regards
Steve Groom.