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Charles McLellan

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Dispatches from the Reviews Editor's desk

Tuesday 28 July 2009, 10:55 AM

A gift from Korea

Posted by Charles McLellan

It's not big and it's not clever, but we couldn't help snickering over the web site from Korean manufacturer Mintpass, whose Mintpad mobile internet device plus associated accessories and services the company promises will "provide every customer with amazements and relentless fun". And so it proves.

One of Mintpass's accessories is the Mint Hard (do you begin to see where this is going?). Apparently an ice cream bar is called a 'Hard' in Korea, as is a hard disk drive — indeed, according to Mintpass, "Koreans would ask each other, 'how big is your hard?' when asking for the PC's HDD capacity". Any visiting Koreans employing such terminology over here may not always receive an answer in gigabytes...

So, what could be more natural than to combine the two meanings, and produce a hard disk drive that looks like an ice cream bar? Enter the Mint Hard — below we see the Mint Hard Chocolate model:




It's actually quite neat: a 1.8in. hard drive in the 'ice cream' portion and a USB flash drive for the 'stick' portion. The Chocolate model has a 120GB HDD and an 8GB USB stick, while the Strawberry ("Wow, how fruity!") is 80GB/4GB and the Vanilla ("Wow, how creamy!") is 60GB/2GB.

Mintpass reassures users who may be taken in by the product's verisimilitude that "Mint Hard has been engineered with a high-density plastic with high gloss coating so that even if a user mistakenly takes a bite, a user need not worry about leaving a teeth mark".

Well, you wouldn't want to leave teeth marks in your Mint Hard, would you?

I'd better stop now, but not before drawing attention to another Mintpass product — the Mint Horn. Check it out.

Comments on this post

Xwindowsjunkie

After your comments about the "Hard" I was somewhat hesitant to click through to the "Horn"! I didn't know what to expect.

What a concept. Take a crappy pair of earphone buds and stick them on a pipe. Any horn with a gradually flared bell is nothing much more than a tuned pipe with a relatively broad low-Q Gaussian-like response curve. So whatever bass response that might have been enhanced by bone conduction is lost. High frequency response is filtered by a lack of any high frequency response curve of the horn. Turn everything you listen to into a bad rendition of Rudy Valee with his megaphone.

They've probably sold thousands to the iPod masses.

Updated by Xwindowsjunkie on Jul 30, 2009 4:00 AM

Charles McLellan

There's a goldmine of eccentric Mintpass products here: http://www.mintpass.com/select/select.asp

Enjoy!

Posted by Charles McLellan on Jul 30, 2009 8:09 AM

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Charles McLellan
  • Charles McLellan
  • London
  • Member since: October 2006
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