Customer Reviews

Pexagon Technology The Complete New Yorker Portable Hard Drive

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Installation: No problems at all. Insert accompanying CD and follow the simple instructions that appear on the screen. Installed without incident on a laptop running Windows XP. (the New Yorker website claims this will work with Vista, perhaps with a little massaging required) The end user license agreement does not contain the spyware clause which many have complained of in reviews of the DVD version of this collection. Connection between computer and portable hard drive is by standard USB cable.

User interface: Very easy to use. I suggest you go to the New Yorker web site for video tutorials on how to search, view, annotate, and create reading lists. http://www.cartoonbank.com/survey/0831_tny_demo/index.html Image sharpness is excellent for text, but some of the pictures have some smudgy spots (which hasn't diminished my overall experience with this product), and magnification can be adjusted so text size should not be a problem for most eyes. There is no ability to copy/paste text from an article, which may be a drawback for some. Pages can be printed. Full text searching is not available. The search feature searches staff-created abstracts of each article and cartoon, each abstract containing a brief description of the piece plus key-word tags selected from a standard list of index words, supposedly resulting a uniform tagging process. This seems to work well. The cartoons are indexed by key words describing theme (for example, if you search the word "lawyers" in the cartoon collection, you will get hundreds of hits, even if the word "lawyers" doesn't appear in the caption of the cartoon).

Device: This is about the size of a Nintendo DS Lite video game system, which means it can fit in your pocket. The device is powered through the USB cable when being used, so no batteries are required. The unit seems fairly sturdy, but I would recommend some sort of protective case (I store mine in a DS case).

Content: What can I say about this? It contains an image of every page of every issue through April 2006, meaning you see all the articles, cartoons, artwork, ads, and covers. An update disk containing issues through April 2007 is available at the New Yorker site for $20, and I imagine that will be an annual offering. As I said, image quality is excellent.

If you aren't already familiar with New Yorker content, it wouldn't seem to make sense to buy this expensive device--sample some current issues from the newsstand at the very least--but if you are a fan, I wholeheartedly recommend this product.