Wolverine MVP-9100 100 GB Portable Storage and Multimedia Viewer

I bought this unit to take along with me on a trip to Korea, and it performed well for me. I had no problems "uploading" my Nikon D200 photos (4GB kingston compact flash cards) on a regular basis. I took a lot of photos, I usual do. On this trip I did not want to bring my laptop, yet needed an alternative to buying 15 compact flash cards, which by the way wasn't a real viable alternative that I was considering. The screen is good for reviewing photos, enough to know "they made it" and it even could render the NEF (RAW) files.

A couple of negatives, though very small ones, are:

- It would have been nicer to keep the JPG and NEF files apart (separate folders perhaps?). I usually shoot JPG+NEF so this device displays "duplicate" images while reviewing - the large NEF files tend to take a while loading, so really slows down reviewing lots of photos. This is more of a nit.

- A little more serious problem, though still a small one, is that the power button and the case (which comes with the unit) tend to align in such a way that the power button can be "held down" long enough for the unit to power on, say, when it's in your luggage! I learned this one day the hard way. I had just charged the unit up before leaving Seoul and set off for Busan. The wolverine was packed-away in my luggage. The next evening, in Busan, its battery was completely dead. Luckily, I was in a place where I could power it with the A/C adapter, however had I been "on the road" and needing it, it would have been a *very* disappointing experience. After that, I wedged a little bent piece of cardboard over the power button. This helped protect the unit from being accidentally turned on, which worked fine. I would suggest on the re-design (follow-on model) that the power-on button be recessed to help protect it from accidental power-on.

Otherwise, the unit is a great success. One morning in a small coastal port town in the south of Korea, I walked the market activities with this unit recording audio. Very cool, and decent quality also!

I'm happy enough using this unit that I still use it at home instead of going straight to the laptop. Later, during my quality laptop time. I can then download several "rolls" at once, treating this Wolverine as my USB drive.

One other comment, though this device is supposed to play music and even videos to some extent, I would not replace my iPod with it. Reasons: it is larger than an iPod, and its user interface is not nearly as elegant. So I end up keeping my music and my photos separate - and I'm happy with that!

We bought a Wolverine portable storage device so we could store photos on it we took on our recent vacation. We would have had to take a laptop with us to store all the photos or bought a lot of extra memory cards if we didn't have the Wolverine. The Wolverine was a great alternative to a laptop as it is a lot smaller and weighs a lot less. The 120/240 Volt built-in recharger feature was great since we were in Eastern Europe and only had access to 240V outlets. We didn't need a voltage converter, just an outlet converter (for the prongs that plug in the outlet)

I give the Wolverine 5 stars, but I have 2 very minor complaints. One, I think the interface for transferring photos needs a little work. The second reason is that the joystick is a little difficult to use. If you push down on the joystick, the photo on the viewer rotates 90 degrees. If you move the joystick left, right, up or down, the Wolverine performs other functions. We ocasionally have problems accidentally pushing down on the joystick when we mean to move it left, right, up or down.

I want to repeat that these are minor problems and I highly recommend this product.

I have one of those beautiful red things. It looks cheap but it is not. I spent 30 days in Europe taking 100 pictures a day (avg) and it did the work beautifuly. I am a brazilian and here in Rio is hot. Even, it works great. Played a lot of videos straight from my hd (divx included), music ok. And it's 100Gb so I think it will never be full. 30 days 30Gigs of pic. and movies. It makes full backups and not just pict. I had a CF and SD cards, no problem as it reads all kind of formats. PnP in 2000 and XP it works like a charm. The video can't give you the exactely way the picture will look like in a computer but its ok. Zoom is good and you can see if foto is ok. Battery takes 10-15Gigs easily (at least when new)
If you take pictures and are looking for storage (doesn't matter your cam/card) do not look anywhere anymore, but it now!

I entrusted a whole trip of photos from Alaska and Vancouver to this device and it worked beautifully. I use a Nikon D70 and had over 2600 pictures on this thing and it didn't hiccup. Photo download speed is very fast. I would recommend this to photographers looking for a more econimical databin that others that are availabe (IE Epson).

The screen is just ok, but you can see what your pictures look like, and your EXIF info. I had no trouble watching movies on this device, it seems to have enough battery life for over one DVD movie. MP3s work fine as well, but it cannot sort or browse by ID tag info, which is a bummer cause that is how my library is arranged. You can work around this. It's not as slick as an Ipod (which I also have), but the Wolverine is so much better for photographers.

Don't know if I would recommend it for someone looking for just an MP3 and Video player,it is huge compared to most of them, but for someone like me who needs a databin for images in the field, this thing is great. In addition, the battery is use replaceable and I hear it is dead simple to swap in a bigger hard drive.

Highly recommended. I also bought mine on sale, so it was an excellent deal compared to a similar Ipod's price.

[...] I'm afraid that I'm not very impressed, but I come to the Wolverine after setting up and extensively playing with a friend's ipod nano. The Wolverine came with lots of cables (good), and a ridiculous carrying pouch with an external speaker that more than doubles the size of the unit (bad). The unit itself is rather large and seems to be fragile -- it doesn't look like it would survive a significant fall. The current firmware (v 1.2.4) is not very good. When I'm playing a video and try to go back to the file listing, the screen goes black and the unit needs to be powercycled or reset. The data itself is all there, it's just that the unit won't display the file listing until it's powercycled or reset -- you would've thought that would've been ironed out during QA testing.

Pros:
nice screen, decent sound quality, rechargable battery, lots of cables supplied, easy file management (no Itunes required!), 7-way memory card reader

Cons:
flaky firmware (keep a paper clip handy), bulky size, sparse manual, lack of sensible holster or armband to tote the fragile looking device around, limited playback options, cost

I'm tempted to rate this 2 stars because I am disappointed with my purchase, but I'll give it 3 on the hope that future firmware will render it more stable and usable.

Jan 8, 2007 update: Later firmware releases *did* tremendously improve the stability of the unit! If you're having the kinds of stability problems I mention above, you can get the latest firmware from Wolverine Data's support site: [...]

At this point it's been over 8 month since a paper clip was needed. The Wolverine has also proven to be fairly sturdy, although we still haven't performed a drop test, and certainly wouldn't want to risk it.