The iZak is at first glance nothing more than a transparent plastic portable hard drive. It has all of the hallmarks - small form factor, a single power LED at the front and a few nondescript ports at the rear. These include a mini-USB 2.0 port for connecting the iZak to your PC, a 3.5mm audio jack and a long slotted port for an adaptor in the box. The iZak though is much more than just a portable hard drive as it's a fully-featured media player.
The USB connector is for downloading movies, music and photos to the iZak, the 3.5mm port is actually a digital optical out port, and the long slotted port is for the bundled output adaptor dongle which features component and S-Video, plus stereo RCA jacks. There's even an adaptor for the dongle, which converts the outputs to a SCART connection.
The beauty is in the iZak's brains and in the multitude of formats it can play back. It's a portable digital media player that offers full DivX support (it's DivX certified), plays MPEG 1, 2 and 4 (including XviD) and also plays back WAVs, MP3s, WMA, AAC, AC3 and Ogg encoded audio. Furthermore, you can also create and replay DVD backups of legitimate home movies by creating DVD ISOs on the drive. It can also play VOBs if you've backed up DVDs that way too, and the digital optical audio out features compressed DTS and Dolby Digital paoss-through.
The user interface is extremely simple, streamlined and easy to navigate with the slim remote, and while the UI looks great on a TV, it looks even better on higher resolution displays as it can scale up to 1024 x 768 for VGA, and even up to 1080i and 720p high definition for other screens.
And if you don't just want to use the iZak as a media player it works just as well as a standard portable hard drive. The casing's certainly rugged enough for the travails of being shoved in backpack, but if there is a negative aspect to the entire product it's unfortunately the high price. There are many cheaper options -- even do it yourself cases -- on the market, but to be fair none have the iZak's overwhelming format support.