Iomega's stylin' storage for MacBook Air

Stephen Withers
Friday, 03 October 2008 10:06

Opinion and Analysis

That MacBook Air you bought sure looked slinky with a generous dollop of sophisticated smooth, but you knew you'd need more storage. Iomega comes to the rescue with an external hard disk that's styled to suit Apple's svelte notebook.

Why lumber your MacBook Air with portable storage that looks like a brick, when Iomega's new eGo Helium is a scintillatingly stylish storage solution available at a price point that won’t make your wallet sink like a stone?

The $A199/$US142 eGo Helium certainly looks the part with its 16mm (0.63in) thick anodised aluminium enclosure. Weighing in at 200g (7oz), it's unlikely to strain your hand luggage - or your bank balance, unlike buying the Air itself!

For comparison, the Air weighs 1.36kg (3lb) and is between 4mm and 19.4mm thick. So the eGo Helium might not be lighter than air, but it is lighter than Air!

To look at it another way, the eGo Helium is roughly the same thickness and weight as the MacBook Air SuperDrive. And if that's good enough for Apple, surely it's good enough for Iomega.

If you do drop the drive, it's supposed to withstand a fall of up to 1.3m (51in) onto industrial carpeting. My guess is that consumer carpeting is even more cushioned, so that shouldn't be an issue unless you're the floorboards and tile type.

"What makes eGo Helium such an effective piece of industrial design is the way it dresses up a highly functional 320G hard drive device into a durable and sleek package with plenty of storage capability, making it an easy-to-use 'eye-catcher' that's small enough to go anywhere," said Iomega's vice president of marketing Peter Wharton.

What about software, or using the drive with other operating systems? See page two.