Some time ago I decided that I needed to get myself a memory card reader. I was managing fine with connecting my various devices to my laptops with cables, but then my laptop decided it didn't want to recognise my old phone, so I couldn't clear the memory card - which I needed to do in order to give the memory card to my dad along with the phone, as he was adopting it once I was done with it.

So after much browsing on Amazon, I chose the Hama USB 2.0 Card Reader 35 in 1. It was reasonably priced at £6.99 (now £9), it took most memory cards, and the reviews were generally favourable. I have mainly micro SD memory cards, but I also have an XD in my camera, plus the Sony M2 card from the abovementioned phone - which I managed to ascertain the card reader would take.

The card reader arrived, and is quite a neat little thing. The reader is contained in blue plastic, and is around 6 x 10 x 1.5cm in size. It has a USB cable with it, a little light on top to show when it is on, and four large slots on the front for the memory cards, all labelled.

The first thing that was obvious to me was that the memory cards needed to be in adaptors for them to fit into the card reader. Maybe this is something I should have known, but I didn't. I'd always wondered what the point was in those adaptors that always come with memory cards. So I hunted out an adaptor for my micro SD cards and got to work backing up and organising photos.

After a minor blip to start with, when my computer kept telling me to plug the card reader into a faster USB slot for better performance (but wouldn't tell me which one was a faster one), I got the card reader going and found it to be very efficient. Files copied from the memory cards onto my laptop quickly and easily, and it recognised new cards very quickly.

I used the card reader for my new 16GB micro SD card for my phone, which I wanted to load with music. Given that I was transferring around 12GB of music, this took longer than the photos, but it was still surprisingly quick. I thought I would have to set it to copy and then leave it overnight, but I was done within about an hour, which included a lot of messing about with what music I wanted on it.

However, I had a bit of a problem when I came to one of the main reasons for purchasing the card reader, transferring photos from the M2 memory card. It needed an adaptor, and although I assume I must have had one at one point, I couldn't find it. I suppose this can't really be taken as a negative point against the card reader, given that it's not a fault of it that I don't have an adaptor, but it's still rather annoying.

That aside, I'm happy enough with the Hama card reader. It's not a terribly exciting gadget, more practical than interesting, but it seems to do the job and it means I don't always need to find various different cables to copy files from my various gadgets.