Samsung announces portable optical drive with Wi-Fi

Just when we thought that optical drives had bitten the dust, Samsung comes up with the SE-208BW with built-in Wi-Fi. They call it a Smart Media Hub, which they claim works with tablets and Android phones as well besides computers. The drive will only be available next year, so there’s no pricing at the moment.

An interesting concept

The idea behind including a Wi-Fi chip is that the drive can also act as an access point or a repeater. The LAN port allows you to connect to a network and also lets you backup data directly. The spare USB port on the drive lets you share data over the network as well. Samsung has also thrown in DLNA support to use with a compatible TV or media player. Coming to the drive’s primary functions - it will read and write CDs and DVDs with a speed up to 24x and 8x respectively. Whether there’s a market for such a device or not remains to be seen when Samsung actually launches it sometime next year.