Bitcoin hardware wallet - Digital Bitbox

 I recently purchased a Bitcoin hardware wallet from Digital Bitbox.

https://digitalbitbox.com/

I thought I would give an overview of my experience with it.

Hardware

The device looks exactly like a USB flash drive. It isn't until connected to a computer that anyone would know the difference. I consider this a huge plus if a user is trying to hide this device among other misc electronics in your luggage or otherwise. Once a wallet is created it can be backed up onto an inserted micro SD card. This would help if the device itself is destroyed. Can just connect this SD card into a new device and recover the old wallet. Wallet creation/removal along with sending Bitcoin requires the user to physically be with the device at that time. This is done with a light sensor on top of the device that functions as a push button. I like this over a mechanical button because this should be more durable long term.

Software

User connects the device and launches the software which immediately prompts for a password before any balance information is displayed. Once logged on a user can send and receive as would be expected. Transaction history information mostly just points to online services that track how a given transaction is doing. Software doesn't do any transaction validation of its own. Unfortunately there is only some minor controls over transaction fees.  What is a standard fee? Don't know until after the transaction has gone through. This also makes sending a complete balance difficult. This caused me to now have a very small amount of Bitcoin essentially stuck on a device.

Overall Thoughts

I really love the hardware design but feel the software is still lacking. Hopefully there are some updates soon but I don't know if there are active developers or not. The code is all open source so maybe some generous people out there could fix these issues.