After two years of hyping the Clik mobile disk drive, Iomega began shipping the darn things on Tuesday on a limited basis in the United States.
The first available product is a Clik drive for digital cameras, the company said. The US$249 bundle includes a Clik flash memory reader, one Clik disk, a battery, and a parallel-port docking station. Individual disks are priced from $9.99 each.
Iomega (IOM) said other Clik mobile drive bundles, including a drive for mobile computers, will ship by the end of the month or in early January. It is expected to retail for $199.
The Clik drives and disks are a miniature version of the company's popular Zip removable drives. The Clik disk, about the size of a flat matchbook, can store 40 MB of data -- the equivalent of 10 copies of Moby Dick. Iomega is pitching the device as the perfect medium for memory-hungry digital cameras or handheld computers.
The Roy, Utah company has had a tough time bringing the product to market, though. The Clik concept was introduced at Comdex in 1996 as the "n-hand." Since then, there have been a series of delays, which Iomega put down to quality testing. It also has spent a fortune on development. In a 12 November filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Iomega said it jacked up its R&D funding by 42.1 percent, to $77.2 million in the first nine months of fiscal 1998. Much of that was due to Clik development, the company said.
So far, the Citizen Watch Company, NEC, and Matsushita are among Clik's potential customers.
