Wish your netbook had a few extra USB ports, a larger hard drive, and weighed a bit more? Well, you’re in luck. A Japanese company is selling a netbook docking kit that adds a few USB ports, a slot for a  2.5″ hard drive or optical disc drive, and a fan for a little extra coolin gpower.Â
The kit sells for 3980 Yen or about $43 US, which seems pretty reasonable. Of course, you’ll have to add the hard drive yourself which will set you back  a few extra bucks. It appears the docking station comes in two varieties. One version has a 4 port USB hub and can be powered via a USB cable from your PC, while the other has a 2 port USB hub and is powered by an AC adapter.
via UMPC Portal and Impress
ohhh kitting it out. dork.
My docking kit arrived today. I’ll be kitting it out with a HDD and CD drive shortly.
https://portablemonkey.com/article/worlds-first-netbook-docking-station/
I ordered one of these today. I’ll post a review up soon.
Which one did you order?
The one with the both the CD-ROM bay and the 2.5 inch drive bay.
The model with the slim optical drive bay along with the notebook HDD bay is especially nice since it allows you to add these peripherals to your netbook without having a kludgy mess on your desk.
That’s what is great about this world. We can all have different opinions. For the money I think this could be useful. Yes, you could do the same thing with a USB hub, a laptop cooler and a USB hard drive, but this is a bit more elegant.
Not sure I see the point of this one.
To use your netbook as a desktop, you need a keyboard, mouse, display, speakers, a DVD/CD drive and maybe a network connection. So if you could get a “mini dock” that hooked up to your netbook via USB you’d only have to connect one cable.
So this thing gets you some USB ports, but you’ll have to still buy a bunch of stuff to solve all the other issues. USB sound card connected to speakers. USB keyboard and mouse no problem. And some way to do DVI-like video over USB. And a USB Ethernet adapter.
If they put all that stuff inside the box, then it would make sense to me.