Overall Rating
 1 of 5

Value Rating
 1 of 5

Used product for
0-1 years

Price Paid:  $500.00 from Dodd Camera

Summary:
Here is a letter I fired off to the corporate CEO at Minds@work I purchased a 6 Gig Digital Wallet in May 2001 for $500 at Dodd Camera in Cleveland.. I started having power related issues with the unit a couple months after I started to use it. The first incident was in August when the power adapter that connects to the docking port malfunctioned and blew out. I was sent a new power cord and the unit would function but started eating up battery power excessively. The batteries started losing their charge rapidly. I am at the point now where the batteries will not even charge. I have been through 3 sets of new rechargeables from Minds@work and not one will retain a charge. I also started receiving various errors when trying to delete files. This has caused me to constantly have to format the drive. This is annoying and in many cases I have lost data as I have not even been able to transfer the files to my PC. In addition the unit itself is flimsy and the door to the battery compartment easily falls off. My experience with your product has been nothing but annoying and a waste of $500 that would have been better invested in a Microdrive or perhaps a Nixvue Digital Album. Working with your customer service and tech support line is equally as frustrating and troublesome. Your reps do not like to return calls or answer E-Mails. You call your service line and wait on hold for 15 minutes and a message comes on telling you to leave a message(give it a try). You leave a message and nobody calls back. Sending an E-Mail is worthless because they are not answered either. Last month I had to call the corporate sales line and have an employee actually walk over to hand someone a note in the support area to actually hear back from a live human being. When I tried to get the power issue addressed last week I received a call from a technical representative who said I should send in my unit for a diagnostic. He told me it would probably have a 4-6 week turnaround. Given my data requirements this is unacceptable and absolutely ridiculous. When I voiced my opinion of your product and service your employee(who was obviously having a bad day and sounded like he just got out of bed) then proceeded to lecture me by claiming Digital Wallets have a less than 1% failure rate. Assuming this is true I guess that''s great unless you''re the 1% who got handed a lemon and ha

Strengths:
If it works it is ok. If it breaks down good luck. Might as well just throw it out.

Weaknesses:
Customer service is abysmal. Technical support is equally as incompetant and unprofessional.

Customer Service:
Unfornunately yes. Hopefully never again.

Overall Rating
 4 of 5

Used product for
2 Weeks

Summary:
Although the Minds@Work digital wallet has a number of minor annoyances in it's design, the sheer practicality of the device and the low cost per megabyte, makes it a MUST-HAVE for anyone taking a digital camera on vacation. It's too expensive to use as a backup device. but I don't think that anyone would purchase it for that purpose.

Strengths:
The digital wallet is very quick (35 sec) in downloading a full 80MB from my compact flash card, is very portable, lasts a long time without recharging, and can store an almost unbeleavable quantity of pictures on it. (6000 hign-quality 3MegaPixel images or up to 134,000 vga quality!)

Weaknesses:
Even though the battery lasts a long time, the battery gauge doesn't seem to even try to represent reality. The card-slot has a poorly designed door.

Similar Products Used:
No similar products.

Customer Service:
No problem. They answered quiestions quickly.