GIZMODO has an item on gadgets that I like, mentioning the Toshiba digital camera whose photos grace this page below, and the iRiver digital audio player (which I bought based on a recommendation on Tyler Cowen’s blog).

I have to say, though, that the flaw in the iRiver is that it only interfaces with a computer that has its software installed. That’s a minor flaw, though a tolerable one in an audio player. (But it makes it largely useless as a general purpose flash-memory drive, though it’s advertised as such.) This raises a general point.

Hardware should work, whenever possible, on any computer it’s hooked up to. One thing I don’t like about a lot of the high-end digital cameras is that their highest quality uncompressed files are saved in a format that needs special software to decode and convert into generally applicable formats. (Some do save as .tif files, which to my mind is better, or are capable of in-camera conversion to .jpegs. They all should be)

Most of the time stuff like that doesn’t matter, but you can bet that sooner or later some incompatibility issue like that will bite you on the ass — you’ll have a camera full of great pictures, and you’ll have some urgent need to email them, but you’ll be stuck with having each picture in a 12MB file that’s too big to email on its own and that you can neither resize nor edit because the computer with the proprietary conversion software is dead or in your lost luggage.

UPDATE: Reader Deepak Sarda points out that there’s a firmware upgrade for the iRiver that makes it mass storage compliant.