New Card Readers SanDisk

Whoa, these are card readers? Mundane but necessary gadgets deserve essentialized designs, and SanDisk's new ImageMate All-in-One and Multi-card look a lot like Neil Poulton's bare, black and glossy hard drives for LaCie.

They're promising some speedy transfer times with the All-in-One—up to 34MB/s with the speediest CompactFlash cards—and you can use multiple card simultaneously to move stuff between cards. It's $30. The Multi-Card is a little pokier, at 30MB/s read times with a fast enough SDHC card. It's $20.

Since we don't see where the USB cable plugs in, I wonder if they have the same problem as the old-school ImageMate I've got—if you don't have 'em propped up on the stand, the port is so recessed you can't use a standard USB cable with it. Blam actually broke the corner off his to make regular mini USB plugs fit. I hope not, since I wouldn't want to mar these. [Sandisk via Ubergizmo Gizmodo]