MojoPac: Making Your Personal PC Portable Pricing and One Gotcha to Note Joseph Moran
Pricing
RingCube is currently offering promotional MojoPac pricing (until November 16th, 2006) of $29.99 and $14.99 for up to three additional licenses. (The product is licensed per storage device, not per user, and MojoPac only supports one user profile per device.) After 11/16, the initial and additional license costs increase to $49.99 and $24.99, respectively.
You can also put MojoPac through its paces with a non-crippled trial version that will work for 30 days or 200 boots (whichever comes first, we presume). RingCube requires you to create an account on their Web site before allowing you to download either the trial or purchase the software. We're not entirely sure why and we'd prefer they didn't, since MojoPac isn't a subscription-based product and doesn't rely on a back-end server.
MojoPac's wide device support allows the flexibility to use it in a variety of different ways. On a small and low-capacity flash device, it can be an easy way to browse the Net on any available system without leaving tracks, while a high-capacity hard drive can provide access to dozens of applications and countless data files in a device considerably smaller, lighter, and less expensive than any notebook PC could possibly be.
Although we didn't try this ourselves, installing MojoPac on an iPod offers the intriguing prospect of eliminating the requirement to pair the device to a specific PC — though admittedly to make this work, your entire music collection must fit on the iPod.
One Gotcha to Note
There is one catch to be aware of when using MojoPac with a large number of frequently-changing files. Although you can easily select additional folders or files from your "real" PC to copy the MojoPac at any time, there's no way to automatically synchronize the data on the MojoPac back to the original system. That's fine if you plan to do all your computing off the MojoPac, but it's a real problem if you want to be able to work with the same data on both the MojoPac and, say, a home PC.
While the lack of built-in security or a sync feature will make it inappropriate for some, MojoPac can be a powerful and convenient tool for those who want the functionality and privacy of having a personal PC without having to carry one around or be tied to a particular system.
Pros: Provides an independent Windows environment you can easily transport from system to system; leaves no trace of applications or data on host PC; works on a variety of hardware from Flash drives to hard drives to music players or mobile phones
Cons: No file encryption built in; can't synchronize files or settings with a “real” PC
