Digital Foci took the opportunity on Friday for the pre-CES launch of a new high-end photo viewer for vacationers and pros. The Picture Porter 35 both doubles the capacity of its full-fledged viewer range to 160GB but also adds a USB host mode that lets users attach an external hard drive to create backups of the viewer's contents without first returning to a PC. It accordingly comes with faster transfer speeds: about 1GB of images can be transferred to the Porter 35 in two minutes.

Software has also been upgraded and lets users check IPTC metadata attached to some photos; users can similarly make custom playlists for slideshows. The Porter continues to support full RAW data from supported cameras as well as common compressed formats, music in AAC/MP3/WMA format, and even basic video support for MPEG-1, MPEG-4 Simple Profile and Motion JPEG.

The Picture Porter 35 carries a reader for CompactFlash, SDHC/MMC, miniSD, xD-PictureCard and multiple Memory Stick formats. Digital Foci's announcement comes well ahead of an actual product launch and won't see the viewer ship until summer for an undetermined price.