On Our Desk - 15

All In One 2

Manufacturer: Akasa
UK Price (as reviewed): £26.50 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): $43.95 (ex. Tax)

Card readers are a generally quite boring product. They’re all the same as one another, with hardly any innovation and each one with the same boxy design to them.

Fan controllers are pretty dull en masse too, especially when it comes to reviewing them – there’s only so many jokes you can make about turning the knob to make it go faster before your review starts getting blocked by Internet filters.

Combine the two together though – a fan controller and card reader in one – and you end up with something that’s so jaw-dropping that you’ll need to wear a chinstrap to even look at it.

OK, maybe not, but the Akasa All in One 2 (or All in Two 1?) is still a pretty useful piece of kit that could suit the needs of almost anyone. In fact, if you too-often find yourself using different external card readers or if your case doesn’t have front or top-mounted USB slots and the like then the All in One 2 could be worth its weight in plastic and copper wiring!


The selection of formats that the All in One 2 can deal in is reassuringly massive too, with support for Compact Flash, MD, SD, Micro Stick Pro and Duo, MMC, Extreme Digital and Micro SDHC cards all on offer, spread out of five different slots.

On top of that there’s an array of connections too – three USB 2.0s, an IEEE 1394, headphone and microphone sockets and e-SATA are all somehow crammed in beneath the little door on the front of the All in One 2.

Finally then there’s the fan controller and temperature sensor, which can hook up to three internal fans and read the temperature from various points inside the case – there’s even an alarm that you can set to go off if things get a bit too close to meltdown. All of the fan and temperature control information goes up on a little colour screen on the right of the All in One, with four buttons to control fan speed and display.


What’s especially good about it all though is that, unlike other card readers we’ve seen like the tentacle-inspired Asus Frontlinker – which is to say that it’s actually built pretty well. The mesh-windowed door which sits over the front of the card readers slides around sturdily and clicks shut with a satisfying thunk – a thunk that seems to say; Is this what you went to University for? To remark on how well doors like me shut?

We’ve not really seen a card-reader cover which forces us to question where our lives have lead us before, so the All in One 2 earns extra points there too.

Admittedly, there isn’t anything wholly remarkable about the All in One 2 – it lets you read pretty much any conventional storage and it lets you control pretty much any conventional fan type (it’s both three and four-pin compatible). It’s not truly rousing stuff and not even a sulky Krogan would go to war over it, but it does the job well enough and it’s not going to fall apart.

So, provided that you don’t mind loading an extra dozen or so wires into your case (though nearly all the connections are optional beyond the USB), the All in One 2 will keep you satisfied.

Verdict: If you don't have an internally-mounted card reader and fan controller, but need one, then this is the one to get. It really is all in one.