New USB designs for all tastes and ages

Ahh the USB (Universal Serial BUS) drive, a boon to mankind for its simple, storage option for data transportation and transference. Without the technical jargon it’s just a pen drive to copy stuff off of one computer to another. Piracy you say? I think not!

In this day and age, the USB portable flash-drive has not remained just a transfer-and-tote device and gone are the streamlined designs of the once simplistic device. Of course for most of the branded drives, the form factor hasn’t deviated too much. But companies have begun to make these devices more personal and in some cases rather ridiculous. Here are some of my favorites.

A company called mimobot has designed limited edition pen drives, (and those are words I never thought I’d hear in the same sentence till joined this industry) to pay tribute to what could possibly be called the greatest Trilogy of all time - Star Wars. That’s not true any more though, considering the prologued trilogy that came out a lot later than the originals.

However this company has designed USB pen drives after some of the famous characters in the films for those true fans. They’re about 2.5-inches tall and 1-inch wide and support USB 2.0. The drives are available in 1, 2, 4, and 8GB capacities. The range consists of characters like Luke Skywalker in his flight suite, C3-PO, R2-D2, Boba Fett, Han Solo and others. The list would be quite incomplete without Vader, so of course he’s there as well, although a lot less menacing than usual. The Data Transfer Force is strong with these.

The toons have fascinated us since we were kids and some of us just didn’t bother to grow up, but rather just upgrade our likes. For the old school and new Disney cartoon lovers, Buffalo a name that’s become quite synonymous with memory, has a line of USB drives with some of Disney’s more memorable characters. The RUF2-DFNR series of USB drives from Buffalo caught my eye while I was researching this feature. They were equipped with just 512MB of internal memory, which was pretty decent for January 2007, but I have to admit the designs were really detailed and sharp.