On Our Desk - 17

On Our Desk - 17

With each and every month that goes by we’re able to accrue more and more junk useful gadgets and it seems that since the bit-tech team moved over to Dennis Publishing the rate that we collect such gear has only increased. Forget swine flu we’re now under a very real threat of drowning in gadgets.

The good news though is that our will to live is stronger than Leonard Nimoy’s eyebrow muscles. Rather that slip beneath the waves of flash drives and mouse mats, we’ve managed to stem the tide for long enough to bring you another edition of On Our Desk. It’s the journalistic equivalent of bailing water out of a sinking lifeboat.

In this, the seventeenth On Our Desk feature, we’ve bundled together the usual collection of gadgets and gizmos into a series of page-long mini-reviews that should give you just information to decide whether a product belongs on your desk too.

Starting off the round-up we’ve got an MP4 Watch from Premier that sounds like something straight out of a Dick Tracy cartoon and should let you watch videos, listen to music and read e-books all on the back of your own wrist. It sounds too good to be true and it turns out that it is too good to be true, but you’ll have to check out the full review to find out why.


After that we step into the ring with Revoltec to have a look at the FightMouse Pro, a new gaming mouse that boasts a number of high-end features and more buttons than we’ve ever seen. The FightMouse Pro hopes to topple the likes of the Razer Deathadder or SteelSeries Ikari and become our gaming mouse of choice – but can it really reach that level of brilliance?

Lightening the tone after that we’ve got a pair of unusually romantic USB flash drives, the Kissing Octopus Drives from a-DATA. These supposedly loveable USB drives are magnetised so that they can stick to fridges and even kiss each other. Don’t ask us why, but they do. It’s actually kind of creepy, but we get into that more in the full review.

A Plantronics GameCom 777 headset is the next item on our list and the perfect remedy to help us forget about kissing octopuses. Quite simply it’s one of the very best headsets we’ve ever used, with a snug over-ear fit and a construction that’s solid enough to withstand an earthquake. It’s most definitely a product that gets the bit-tech recommendation.


Moving on again, we’ve got an OCZ eSATA Throttle drive which is small enough in size to fit on your keyring (just), but big enough in capacity to hold whatever movies you don’t want to leave laying around. While the eSATA connection is the focal point of the product it also has a mini-USB connection in case you need to access the data on an older PC. Both connections offer plenty of speed but, again, we’ll get to that in the full review.

If portable storage doesn’t interest you though then it’s likely that you’ll be interested in the new LAN104 Network Storage option from Icy Box, which lets you make USB flash drives accessible over networks once they've been plugged into the router. It sounds a promising idea, but there’s been some dissent over this particular On Our Desk entrant – read about it in the review.

The last item on our desk this month is a Lego Technic kit which we got it to help space things up a bit – because there’s nothing like following complicated building diagrams and losing small bricks to get us excited. This Technic Offroader is a battery powered jeep which has been keeping us busy for the last few weeks and we’ll definitely use for inter-office deliveries in the future.

So, what are you waiting for? Read on to find out what we think of all this wonderful kit!