CF Accessories for Q1

I published this article about two months ago but I feel that this is the right time to re publish it again, now that Santa is preparing all the boxes and shopping around for some of the hard to find gifts. ;)

The Compact Flash slot is one of the best features that the Samsung Q1 has. Yes, the CF cards are old and big but I prefer to have this slot than a SD Card one. And I will explain in this article why. Being one of the oldest memory card format in the market it had the time to mature and now we have, beside all sizes and types of Memory CF Cards, a lot of different accessories that use the CF slot to connect to our Pocket PCs, PDAs, and now Q1s. Being an old technology sometimes is not bad at all, the price for these accessories is sometimes 10 times less than when they came out to the market few years ago.

Memory Card Readers and Adapters.

The Samsung Q1 could become the best companion for a professional photographer. Yes, I know that most of the Digital Cameras in the market can be connected to this UMPC via a USB Port but in my experience that's not a comfortable thing to do when you are on the road. Well, here are a few adapters and card readers that will allow you to connect almost any Memory Card to your Q1.

17 in 1 CF Adapter

This adapter allows you to connect to your CF Slot 17 different type of memory cards: SD, miniSD, MMC Plus, MMC, MMC Mobile, RSMMC, TranFlash (needs an adapter), MS, MS Magic Gate, MS Select, MS Duo, MS Duo MagicGate, MS PRO, MS PRO MagicGate, MS PRO DUO, MS PRO DUO MagicGate and xD.

If you need just a more specific adapter you can find some like the Hi-Touch Secure Digital to Compact Flash Card Adapter.

This one is just for SD and MMC Cards and the advantage of this kind of adapter is that it does not keep part of it out of the CF slot like the first one I mentioned.

If you use xD Memory Cards then you can buy the Delkin Devices XD TO COMPACT FLASH ADAPTER (DDXDFLS-AD).

Now you can see why I said that the Samsung Q1 could be the best companion that any Professional Photographer ever had. You can use in this device virtually any memory card without having to deal with USB Cables attached between two expensive devices while you are on the road.

GPS

You can find some GPS devices using CF Format. I'll mention just two of them that I found with drivers for PC.

• Ambicom Compact Flash GPS Receiver

• Holux GM-270 - GPS receiver module

The price of these two is between 60 and 80 dollars. In both cases you can connect an Antenna, something that you may need when you are using these GPS in your car.

Modem

Believe it or not there are moments when probably you are going to need a modem to get access to Internet. In this case you can use the Pretec 56k Compact Flash Modem.

Serial Adapter

If you work in a IT Department you may need a Serial Connection to configure some devices. If this is the case then you can use something like the Targus PA611U CF To Serial I/O Card.

PCMCIA Adapter

If you are like me, a real mobile geek, and you have been around Notebook or TabletPCs your whole life, I'm sure that you may have some PCMCIA cards around, probably an old modem... then you will need an ORA Memory PCMCIA to CF Card Adaptor

Barcode Scanner

What about keeping a Inventory Control Database? In this task you are going to need a Scanner like the Pretec CF LASER Barcode Scanner for PDA/ Pocket PC & portable devices w/ CF slot.

Web camera

I left this accessory for the end of this article because probably it will need some tweaking to make it work in a Samsung Q1: Pretec VGA CF Camera for PDA/ Pocket PC & portable devices w/ CF slot.

I could not find any information about this being used in a PC of any kind but I do remember when this camera was released a long time ago that Pretec released libraries to create programs compatible with this camera and I think to recall that somebody prepared a tool for PCs. Sharp also released it a CF camera: Sharp Zaurus CE-AG06 Digital Camera Card.

I could not find any evidence of the Sharp being used in a PC. In both camera the lens can be moved 180 degree allowing you to use it as a digital camera or as a web camera. Both are 1.3 mega pixel cameras so do not expect to take good quality pictures with these in the case that they can be used in a Q1.

Conclusion

I hope that this article has helped you to have a whole idea of how many things you can use in your Samsung Q1 Compact Flash slot. As you can see even when CFs are old and slow, to have a CF slot could be a lot better than to have a SD slot where you can connect a lot less accessories.

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