SanDisk’s V-Mate has been around since just before Christmas, and looks an interesting product. It copies video – be it from a DVD or your PVR – onto a flash drive so that you can play it on portable devices such as a mobile phone.

The device is hooked into your DVD player, PC or PVR such as Sky+, and then copies a programme real time to a flash card. SanDisk said it holds one hour per GB at 640x480 VGA resolution and up to 3.5 hours at lower settings.

It will copy Hollywood DVDs – and with the big studios blessing, said Matthijs Hutten, the product’s marketing manager, because it makes an analogue version. And not everyone would keep the move permanently anyway – unless they had an abundance of flash cards.

A neat touch is its internal database, which allows it to be connected to PVRs so that you can programme it to record a favourite programme automatically. Well almost. It’s not networked and doesn’t have an Electronic Programme Guide (EPG), so you have to manually programme it to record. But SanDisk is looking at possibly producing a version in the future that also has an EPG.

It costs €130.