Who doesn’t love goodies? I know I do. I remember a time when I was visiting Amsterdam with a friend, where we had found this city guide full of vouchers (the I Amsterdam City Card, for those of you interested, apparently it still exists). Mind you, this was back in the days when smartphones were, well, yet to find their way to the masses, the very first iPhone had barely seen the light of day, so we didn’t have all the fancy apps like TripAdvisor to guide us. In those few days we were in Amsterdam, we were scoring all the goodings the vouchers were valid for, just for sports, even though we ended up with a bag full of useless stuff afterwards.
Back on topic now, after getting our hands on the Transformer, I also ordered some complimentary goodies to go with it, or to go with my camera. No, they weren’t free (some of them were cheap though).
The carrying bag
The Transformer is portable. Very portable. But that’s worth nothing if you cannot take it with you. So we got a carrying bag.
We wanted something slim, but the charging cable had to fit in as well. Most of the time you’ll find a sleeve (can’t take the cable) or a large bag or backpack (too large for us). After going through Amazon for a while we found a few possibilities. In the end we chose the Case Logic LNEO-10.
It’s neoprene, as are most of the sleeves. However, it has two handles (so you can carry it, yeay!), and an extra pocket on one side for small extra stuff (like, I don’t know, a charger maybe?). Got everything we were looking for. Did I mention you’ve got a number of colors to choose from? That’s another plus, it’s available in Chrisje’s favorite color, the one we got it in.
Purple.
The card reader and usb hub
The Transformer has a USB3 port in the dock, which is very convenient. High speeds, who doesn’t want that? It only has one though, so if you want to attach a disk and a stick, you’ve got a problem (especially with the disk space being low on the device itself). Enter USB3 hub.
We got this one by Tecknet. I have only done some minor testing, but so far it seems to be doing what it’s supposed to do. Expect some speed tests in the future though.
As the Transformer only has a micro-SD card slot, we also got a card reader for it as well. What good is a laptop if it cannot take any camera cards? We got this one, by Kingston. It’s also USB3, so speeds should be through the roof. Except maybe my card won’t be able to do that. We’ll see.
It’s quite small (convenient to take it with you), but feels a little plastic-y, and the sliding mechanism hiding the card slots feels a little loose and cheap. It has decent reviews all over the place, so the combination made the choice quite easy.
Again, it works, but no speed tests as of yet. Something with time and not having any left…
The camera remote
It’s called the Photo Plus infrared shutter remote. No, it’s not original Nikon, it’s for Nikon. With that being said, it costs nearly nothing, and it does what it’s supposed to do: trigger the camera. Nifty little thing that will be useful someday, I just know it.
The lens pen
Another camera addition, this Hama lens pen. Does what it says. I cleaned both my lenses with it so far, and they seem clean without scratching.
So what are all these for, and why am I telling about them?
By the time you’re reading this we are running a little “side project”. It’s a little too early to get into details, but we’ll be using all of the above for it. We’ll also be using a lot of other stuff that we have lying around already too. It will all be explained in due time, no worries!