Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

If your keychain is a little heavy these days, maybe its time to downgrade your USB drive. Don’t worry, you won’t be losing any storage space. The thing that you will be downgrading is your USB drive’s weight. You can get 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB versions for $33, $58, and $89, respectively. How heavy (or light) are these USB drives? They all weigh-in at around 2 grams. If you can’t envision 2 grams, pick up two paper clips. Yes, they’re that light.

Read [Engadget] Via [Impress]

What you see above are not just some colorful super-small USB drives on a colorful background. These mini USB drives, dubbed the Sony Micro Vault (aka, the Pocket Bit Mini, in Japan), will soon come loaded with content and replace CDs as the media of choice—if Sony has their way.

“Amid the rapid advancement of size reduction in the Walkman, viewer terminals and other compact products, we judged that USB memory could be applied for such products only if it were smaller. In addition, given the growing capacity of flash memory, technical circumstances were about to mature for us to realize a small-size, large-capacity USB memory device”—Takeshi Funabashi

What do you think? Online media sales are doing well but CDs and DVDs still get sold in stores. There is also a major format war going on that involves hard media. Will these new tiny storage devices succeed in content distribution or is Sony behind the ball again, wasting their time on hardware instead of focusing on software?

Read [Tech On]

If you are a Vonage customer or are considering switching to Vonage read on, otherwise go download Skype or Gizmo and be happy.

Vonage has released a portable access point for the Vonage service, that is available for Vonage customers. For $39.99 you buy a USB drive that comes preloaded with a program that allows you to call anyone in the world from any computer in the world with two things: a network connection and a USB drive. The USB stick comes with a microphone as well as 250MB of usable memory, for you to use at your conscience.

This seems like a good buy for those of you already using Vonage, but if you are not a customer I would recommend holding off, if you intention is just to use this feature.

Product Page [Vonage]
Read [TechEffect]
Read a review of the product [Gizmodo]

Sony announced a new 8GB model in its MicroVault Pro portable hard drive series. This unit stores information on a1-inch hard disk drive (HDD) and is protected by a highly polished, metal casing, the size of a business card. The unit easily connects to your computer with it’s built in swivel USB connector (USB 2.0). The MicroVault Pro comes pre-loaded with Sony’s Auto Sync file synchronisation to backup data. The software allows the retrieval of up to 10 generations of a file stored.

The new 8GB MicroVault Pro will be available later this month at a recommended retail price of £135 in teh UK. No US price set yet.

Read [BIOS Magazine]