Hands on: Belkin Flip for Mac mini

Belkin has a huge booth here at Macworld (and I'll post an Engadget style booth tour later).%uFFFD I asked Burk Murray, director of Belkin product management, what I should look at since I am way too important to just wander around with the rest of the Macworld attendees and he said, without hesitation, 'The Flip for Mac mini,' which is a fancy pants KVM switcher designed for the Mac mini.

Laurie has been covering the Flip for awhile, and she will be writing up a review of it shortly, but let me tell you I was impressed with this thing. It has touch sensitive buttons on the front that let you access features like CD ejecting, volume, and switching video/audio. Thanks to some software you can also switch just the video, so if you are working on your Mac mini listening to some tunes and you want to use the Windows box that you have hooked up to the Flip you can do so without having to miss out on the song.

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Source: http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Merchant_…

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Macworld Accessories Mac mini

Belkin has a huge booth here at Macworld (and I'll post an Engadget style booth tour later).%uFFFD I asked Burk Murray, director of Belkin...

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Jay Gamel

I bought one five days ago and it turns the volume off/on up/down and randomly switches between computers. It's junk and there's no help from Belkin. No phone help, of course, and only an auto-responsse to my e-mail saying they are experiencing "high volumes" of support requests. That's what you get when you sell crap.

January 24 2006 at 11:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

xnooby

I bought one of these, and it randomly changes the volume level, and randomly switches between the PC and Mini. Total waste of money. Several other people on 123macmini.com have the same problem. Belkin has "never heard of" the problems. At least it looks great. I'd be happier if it simpluy didnt work, rather than be infuriating.

January 21 2006 at 12:28 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Laurie

I'll clarify Scott's picture... the thing on top of the Mac mini pictured is NOT part of the Flip. That's their FW/USB hub sitting on top. The thing on the bottom is the Flip :) The color is white, same finish as the mini.

January 12 2006 at 1:29 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Oliver

That looks awful. They couldn't even make it the same colour as the Mac?

January 12 2006 at 3:49 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Tice

Looks like a plastic sandwhich - yuk!

January 12 2006 at 1:08 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Beck

It was probably just the macs that they rented. or so the man told me.

January 12 2006 at 12:09 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Laurie

Belkin sent me one that arrived just before I was leaving to come to San Francisco, so I'll be hooking it up and doing a full review when I return to New York. I did spend some time with Burk and also hands on with the Flip at the booth and it really is an impressive device. I didn't notice any real issues with video quality, but I don't recall what the resolution settings were at the time. The maximum resolution is 2048x1536 @65Hz.

January 11 2006 at 10:08 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Beck

Yeah i got back from macworld today.

this was one of the items i toyed around with for a bit. my only concern was the resolution that it was using. might have been poor system settings, or the KVM

i'm hoping the system settings because it was horrid to look at. for pete's sake my iBook had a better looking display then the mini did through the Flip.

January 11 2006 at 9:22 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply