With many of us trying to be more secure online by choosing better, less redundant and overall more secure passwords, the real question is “How do we remember them all?” Atek, a California based company, thinks they have a solution with their Logio Password Organizer Device.
It’s tiny –‚ only 1/8″ thick. The device reminds me of a cheap oven timer, and with that take on things, it’s very disappointing with flimsy thin plastic that almost breaks in half if you type with firm pressure.
The keyboard is somewhat acceptable yet very cheap-feeling again. I’ve found most of the other buttons take a few presses to get the unit to respond.
I found performance to be below average but manageable when you apply heavy pressure to the keyboard, which is really just a pain. I also found the interface to be very slow, and it often took a few seconds to respond to basic commands.
The simple menus are, well, simple. However, it is extremely tedious to keep pressing the down arrow to get to your listing at the end of the list when you store many items. The unit can store up to 200 records, but I couldn’t imagine pressing the down arrow 200 times to get to the last listing.
Two hundred is also a small number, considering several gigabytes of data fit into tiny secure digital cards these days.
The Logio stores all your passwords behind one AES-encrypted master password. Try not to forget that one.
I’ve always believed that as consumers, our pockets are filled with devices. We have our mobile phones, iPods, flash drives and more strapped onto our belt and stuffed into our pockets. Smartphones are beginning to get more and more advanced and with Apple, RIM, Palm and Windows Mobile taking new approaches we might finally be able to free our pockets.
With this in mind, the Atek Logio Password Organizer seems like a safe way to organize passwords and is defiantly more secure than your traditional pen and paper, but it contributes to the device clutter problem. I believe that the prototype would be far more successful if the company could develop mobile applications with this same functionality in mind for Smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s Backberry devices and Windows Mobile Smartphones.
The product retails for $29.95 and is available at http://www.atek.com/
I use lastpass (https://lastpass.com) to remember all of my passwords. It organizes them into groups, helps me generate strong passwords, has secure notes, and does automatic form fill. And it is free!