We’re not entirely sure why you’d want a hand-crafted, silver-plated 4GB memory key in the shape of a pebble, but perhaps Valentine’s 2011 is geek-themed and nobody bothered faxing to let us know. LaCie‘s latest design partnership is with Christofle, the end result being the Galet USB Key.
The French-finished memory disc comes in a “charming gift box” and LaCie reckons it’s ideal for wearing around the neck on a chain; we’d also suggest replacing your boring old pocket-watch with one, or perhaps wearing it as a less-useful monocle. The LaCie Galet is available now, priced at £94.99 ($152).
Press Release:
Christofle and LaCie Reveal Luxury for Every Day: Galet USB Key
• Imagined by Christofle
• Assembled and silvered in France
• 4GB of storage
London, UK (20th January 2011) – Today, two distinguished brands, Christofle and LaCie, introduce an elegant object for your digital belongings – Galet, design by Christofle. With its beautiful pebble shape and magnificent silver-plating, the Galet is a conversation piece that proves beauty and functionality can easily co-exist in our daily lives.
Changing the definition
The Galet is a new way of thinking about personal technology. Like a designer watch or a luxury pen, the Galet is an essential accessory.
Hand-crafted in France, each piece is individually plated with precious silver through Christofle’s 150 year-old silvering process. Then it is carefully inspected for a smooth finish and radiant polish, which guarantees its excellence. The Galet is assembled and hand-packed in a charming gift box at LaCie’s factory in Paris, ensuring each Galet represents the finest presentation and quality. Once the process is complete, the result is a timeless gift that will bring convenience and luxury to one’s daily life.
Mobility made chic
The Galet is a collector of photo and music memories. It is a beautifully simple USB solution to keep your cherished files close and accessible. The Galet’s pebble shape easily fits into your life – in your pocket, on your key chain, or even around your neck – so you can take it with you wherever you go.
“The spirit and philosophies of Christofle and its luxury brand, combined with the technical expertise of LaCie, have come together to transform a universal technology into an object that is as beautiful and simple a treasured piece of jewellery,” said Luc Pierart, Business Unit Manager, Consumer Peripherals, LaCie “Each time you open it, its mystery is revealed – an elegant USB key.”
Availability
The Galet comes in 4GB and includes LaCie’s Private-Public software with password protection. The Galet is available for £94.99 in Christofle boutiques worldwide, as well as the LaCie Online Store. For more product information, visit www.lacie.com.
Active Media Products outs a strange and novel flash drive every now and again and often the things look like bullets. The latest addition to the world of novelty flash drives from the company looks like a small .22 caliber bullet that’s larger than life to fit the flash storage inside. The little bullet drive has a metal casing.
That casing is watertight thanks to a rubber seal to protect the drive if you drop it into water. You can get the bullet with 4GB or 8GB of storage inside the silver case and it has a ring built into the back of the drive to attach the thing to your keychain or a clip.
The drive comes in a silver color only and does include a key ring. It measures 2.6″ x 0.6″ and will work with Mac and PCs with USB 2.0 ports. The 4GB version is on Amazon for $13.95 with the 8GB version selling for $20.95.
Passed on Isabella Products’ Vizit digital photo frame? ‘Tis a shame, really. But hey, if you were one of the millions gifted with a lackluster, non-connected digiframe over the past few years, at least the aforesaid company is giving you a way to make things right. The outfit’s newly launched Mini is one special USB key, embedded with an AT&T 3G SIM and tailor made to provide cellular connectivity to dormant frames. The key is linked to one’s VizitMe content management service, and users will be able to email photos directly or have the device extract content from Photobucket and LIFE.com; once received, owners will see new images pop up on any frame that accepts USB keys. Furthermore, these same emailed images can be viewed on USB-equipped monitors and televisions. The company’s planning to ship the Mini in Q2 of this year for an undisclosed rate, but naturally, we’re more interested in the potential unadvertised capabilities. An off-contract, fee-free USB key with an AT&T SIM card within? Sounds like we’re just a hack or two away from the most beautiful mobile broadband card this world has ever seen.
Sharkoon has unveiled a new flash drive for geeks looking for all out speed for this storage devices. The new drive is called the Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo and it promises some very fast read and write speeds. The little flash drive has read and write performance of up to 130MB/s.
The drive comes in a black aluminum housing and will work with USB 3.0 ports and earlier slower version of USB. It supports all major operating systems and has a single USB 3.0 controller chip. The drive uses 1.2V of power in use and has a storage capacity of 16GB.
The memory modules inside the slick little device are synchronized SLC NAND Flash. The little drive measures 68 x 21 x 9 mm and weighs 12.4g making it very small and portable. Pricing and availability info are unknown at this time.
Patriot Memory has announced the launch of a new USB 3.0 drive that is crazy fast and uses a single chip inside. The new flash drive is called the Supersonic and works with the USB 3.0 interface on computers today. The flash drive has a quad channel architecture and is very small and light.
The flash drive has an aluminum housing that makes the storage device robust. Patriot claims that the thing can resist shock up to 15G to protect your data. It is offered in 32GB and 64GB capacities. The drive will ship in Q1 2011.
The quad channel tech in the flash drive allows the device to operate faster. Sequential write speed is promised to be 70MB/s and sequential read is 100MB/s. Pricing of the new flash drive is unannounced.
While going into a store and finding a DVD or Blu-ray to rent may not be what’s popular anymore, other services like Netflix and Hulu are seeing quite the attraction, thanks to the fact that you don’t actually have to go anywhere other than your computer, TV, or maybe as far as your mailbox to watch a movie. Then, there’s services like Redbox that allow you to rent a movie for cheap, on a daily rate, and then return it back to the kiosk when your’e finished with it. But, Flix on Stix wants to take that idea, and make it a bit more useful for those who may not want an actual DVD to take home, or have to worry about returning it.
The idea is a pretty simple one. Instead of letting people rent movies on a DVD, Flix on Stix wants to let people use their own USB flash drives, or let them use one offered by the kiosk itself, to watch whatever movie they want. While there are talks about offering pre-loaded USB drives via the kiosk, it seems that the most likely event will be making customers bring their own, and then transferring the film onto it.
Price wise, Flix on Stix is aiming low. $1 for three days; $2 for six days; $3 for nine days; and $4 for 12 days. And, as we mentioned above, you won’t have to worry about returning the flash drive to the kiosk. Instead, the company behind the idea wants to include software with the rental that would make it automatically refuse playback after a certain amount of days.
All of the kiosks will be installed with USB 3.0 ports, making it possible for those who have spent the money on a USB 3.0 flash drive to have quick installs of their movies. However, unless a major price shift happens by the time Flix on Stix happens, it’s likely to assume that the majority of people won’t have USB 3.0 drives. That means some long waits at the kiosk as you’re movie downloads and installs onto your flash drive. Will anyone really want to wait that long, when Redbox is remarkably quicker, or they can just use Netflix? There’s no word on when, or if, this idea will really hit the market any time soon, but if someone can put enough money behind the idea, we won’t be surprised to see these vending machines pop up in some big cities.
Hard to say why this here fad is just now catching on — after all, select studios warmed to the idea of putting their content onto portable flash storage years ago. That said, we’ve seen both Flix on Stix and this here contraption surface within the same month, but honestly, we’re having a hard time believing that it’s a niche waiting to explode. Mo-DV has just announced a new Universal Player for microSD cards, enabling Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile and your everyday Windows PC to play back DRM’d movies stored on a microscopic slab of memory. As for Android users, they’ll need version 2.1 or newer, and while few details are given, the company has confessed that more platform support is coming (good luck, Windows Phone 7). No one’s talking pricing or release information just yet, but potentially more frightening is this: has anyone ever considered just how inconvenient it is to keep a handful of microSD cards around, let alone swap them in and out of your smartphone?
We talk about Super Talent quite a bit with the company always seeming to be offering up a new flash drive or SSD for us to check out. Today that company is back with a cool new flash drive that works with USB 3.0 and offers a virtual PC inside as well. The new device combines Creedo Personal with the Super Talent USB 3.0 Express RAM Cache flash drive.
The new drive is crazy fast when crammed into a USB 3.0 port and if you don’t have a USB 3.0 port, the thing is also very fast in a USB 2.0 port as well. Creedo is a portable Windows environment that can run totally from the flash drive allowing the drive to be used as a virtual PC. Creedo supports many Windows native applications and will work on any PC so you can take and entire PC with you on the go for access to your apps and content wherever you are.
The combination of the RAM Cache flash drive and Creedo makes using a virtual machine a snap and Super Talent figures that the offering is perfect for students that need to use a computer in a library or lab that is locked down preventing them from loading apps they want to run. The flash drive bundled with Creedo comes in three capacities including 16GB, 32GB, 64GB with prices of $79, $139, and $229.
It seems like every few weeks Super Talent tosses a new flash drive onto the market to lure geeks to part with some of their money for a new and fashionable storage device. The latest offering from Super Talent has surfaced called the USB Pico Mini and the new flash drives come in two styles.
The Pico Mini C has a retractable USB connector that tucks away inside a case that is about the size of a quarter. The Pico Mini D is the same size but has a case that slides up and down to hide the USB connector. Both of them look really nice and the small size would make them easy for me to lose. The Mini D has a connector that will let you hang it on a key ring though.
Super Talent is offering the small drives in different capacities that will make them appropriate for all sorts of uses. Both styles are offered in 2GB to 32GB of storage. It never ceases to impress me how much storage space we can cram into such a small device today.
Some folks out there have to buy all the quirky flash drives that they run across. If you are one of these types of geeks we have a new one for you from Active Media Products. The new drive is called the Bullet USB Drive.
The drive comes in a gold color that is designed to look like a bullet. The thing is specifically designed to look like a .50 caliber bullet and the case of the bullet has the AMP logo on it. The flash drive has a keychain included to connect it to your keys.
It is waterproof and shock resistant and can be used on Mac and PC computers. It is offered in 4GB or 8GB capacities and measures 3″ x 0.6″. The 4GB version of the drive sells for $12.45 and the 8GB version is $21.95 with both on Amazon right now.
