Q: What is more portable than a laptop, tablet, or smartphone?
A: A USB flash drive.
And there you have it, in two short lines: the reason why I (together with many, many others) love flash drives. So much that I (together with many, many others) never venture anywhere without at least one.
If you want me to be thorough, I can give you a few more reasons for this infatuation with flash drives. Here they are:
- They are small. (Mine doubles as a key ring and a friend wears one as a pendant on a chair around her neck.)
- They are inexpensive.
- They fit into my computer, and my laptop, and my tablet, and my smartphone. (All right, I do need a USB-to-micro USB adapter for the last device, but that’s not a big problem.)
- They are easy to use. (Great for digitally challenged, like… some people I know.)
- They do not need a power supply of their own. (I have no power outlets to spare!!!)
- They have fast write and read times.
- They can hold lots of data. (My first one from about the turn of the century had 8MB of storage capacity; some time ago, I outgrew 8GB; and I know people who turn up their noses at anything under three digits, in gigabytes.)
- They don’t mind being dropped. (In techie-speak, they have good kinetic shock resistance.)
- They have many names. The most popular are: flash drive, USB drive, thumb drive, pen drive, memory stick, and jump drive.
- They come in many shapes. (Since it’s with me all the time, it may as well look cure.)
- They make a great gift. And if being useful and pretty is not enough, you can always customise the flash drive earmarked for gifting by recording something special on it.
And just in order to illustrate my point (or points), here are some of the best-looking flash drives I recently spotted on bidorbuy:
Any one of them would be welcome as a gift! (Hint, Hint.)
