Product Reviews

It must have sounded like a great idea at the time - a USB and FireWire hub that looks like anything but. And if any company could pull off a quirky twist on a mundane peripheral, surely it would be LaCie, with its tradition of employing designers such as Philippe Starck and Neil Poulton to provide it with accessories that stand out from the crowd. This time, it's the turn of French designer OraIto, and the result, sadly, is a bit of a mess.

You wouldn't know it from the publicity shots - it looks great in those - but take it out of the box, set it up and try to use it, and it's immediately clear that the Huby is all form and very little substance. The primary difficulty is that it's inherently unstable. The flat base on the bottom of the white plastic sphere is a little over an inch in diameter and with cables plugged into all of its eight ports, the weight has to be carefully distributed to allow it to balance.

Problem number two is the sheer amount of desk space it takes up. Although only 4in in diameter, the fact that the cables must be pulled in different directions to avoid toppling it means the total space requirement is more like a foot square. The location

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of the power socket - on the lower front of the sphere - means the cable will be pointing towards you unless you turn the Huby around, in which case the USB and FireWire cables are pointing away from you. That seems counter-intuitive to us. The cables themselves are only 20in long and so aren't convenient for connecting to a printer or scanner, although there's one FireWire and two USB extenders included in the box.

We also found the cable sockets inside the Huby to be loose, so that when we connected everything, slotted on the lid and connected a device, the cable would sometimes come loose, meaning we had to unscrew the lid and start again.

It's not all bad news, though. There are plenty of cables included, so you can connect just about every FireWire or USB device you could need, including a DV camcorder and USB peripherals with mini USB sockets. There's also a USB light and USB fan included in the box. The eight ports mean you can connect four USB 2 devices and two FireWire 400 peripherals; the other two ports connect to your Mac. And the external power supply enables you to connect devices that need power from the USB bus, although it's probably a good idea to disconnect the fan and light if you want to do this. Oh, and there are coloured LEDs - eight of them - which light up when you have devices connected to the Huby. Cute, if you like that sort of thing.

At £70, the Huby isn't cheap, nor does it work particularly well as a USB and FireWire hub. These things might have been forgivable if it looked stunning - after all, it will be bought as much for its aesthetics as anything else - but it doesn't. Unless you take great care in setting it up, you're likely to end up with a top-heavy, tangled mess. Which isn't the point at all.