After my stint as Santa this morning, I ended up heading to U-Village to take our son to his haircut appointment. I was fearing the worst, as my thoughts were around battling an army of 3-series drivers for scarce parking spots. But in the end, parking was tight but not awful, and it really only took me 2-3 minutes to find a reasonably decent spot (aka “the first spot available”).

It was a nice trip to U-Village all-in-all. Our son got a nice haircut, he played well in the little play area, and then he let me head to the Apple store after getting a hot chocolate at Starbucks (we waited there longer than trying to find a parking space). My gadget goal for today was the iPod Camera Connector for my 5G iPod (60GB/black) and my Canon SD450 (don’t think it will work with my Canon EOS 10D) so that I can untether myself from a laptop on vacations.

I got home and tried it out and I have to say that it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. I’ve read iLounge and various other reports that say that the camera connector sucks the life out of both the iPod and camera batteries and while it did take longer than I would’ve liked and sucked more juice than I would’ve like, it wasn’t nearly as alarming as I had feared. There were 220 photos on my 1GB SD card (~60% used, I think) and they were copied over to the iPod using what seemed to be about 15-20% of the total battery. And at $29, it’s a pretty good price (especially given that the phrase “pretty good price” isn’t typically associated with Apple branded products).

Pros

Cons

All-in-all, I give this accessory a thumbs up! 4 stars (out of 5)! Whatever rubrick you so desire. It’s very much worth not hauling around a laptop with you even though it has its drawbacks.