The minute you see it, you just have to love the USBee concept flash drive. Traditional USB flash drives stick out from the back, and they’re easy to knock out accidentally. The USBee solves this, because just like a bee, it is capable of bending in any direction. This helps prevent your USB port from being permanently defunct should a standard USB flash drive be broken off at its connection point.

It’s not only ergonomic, it also has a vents for cooling and a detachable protective cap that sits on the back of the device when not in use. It’s the bee’s knees baby! All zing and no sting!

Irish startup PortoMedia will soon be offering movie rentals on flash drives instead of your typical media device. It’s a pretty simple concept. The company sells you a flash storage device along with a special $50 card reader that has a super fast proprietary USB connection of 95 megabits per second.

Just take the flash card to any location that has a company kiosk. The kiosks will contains hard drives that store hundreds or even thousands of movies. Enter your ATM pin code, choose your movie, and download it in less than a minute. After that, you just go home and watch it. It does have it’s advantages over DVD or Blu-Ray. They would never run out of movies, no return neccessary, no long lines and you could get movies anywhere, whether it be the mall, supermarket, even a gas station.

Samsung is trying to dispel some concerns consumers are having about using flash-based solid-state drives in their computers, saying they are more reliable that a lot of people think. Sure, having a 64GB SSD in your notebook at first sounds like a pretty good idea. Faster boot times, no moving parts to wear out, but then the price hits you. Adding that SSD can increase the overall price of the computer by as much as $900. Also, in terms of computing, a maximum 100,000 write cycles just doesn’t seem like that much.

Michael Yang, flash marketing manager at Samsung, is assuring us that 100,000 write cycles is actually quite a bit. He states that the SSD can write 100,000 times to each and every memory cell, and the drive controller evens out the cells that get written to with “wear leveling”. As an example, Yang says that a 64GB SSD could be fully erased and filled again with data every hour and it would still last years before failing. He also said the failure would then likely come from the controller, not the memory cells. He also expects the price of SSDs to drop around 40 percent each year, making this alternative more affordable.

Here’s a pocket gaming system that’s not from Nintendo or Sony, but from Korean company called MyRacer. The MF101 portable looks like a media player, but it’s actually a pocket-sized game machine. It’ll play music and video files in several formats, but it will also play a number of Adobe Flash-based games, like the ones from Korea’s Play4U or Com2uS catalog.

It sports a pair of directional controls, even shoulder buttons. The user interface is even Flash-based. The system has a 320×240 resolution 2.4-inch color LCD screen, and comes with 1GB of on-board memory, which is expandable with an SD slot. It’s not available in the US yet, of course. But if you want to try to score one from a Korean retailer, it will cost you around $104.

What the hell? A planet where apes evolved from men? Not exactly, but a twist just as mind bending. This is a world where, instead of Pac-Man being chased by ghosts, you control the ghosts as Pac-Man comes after you. That’s the idea behind this new Flash game called “Anti Pac-Man”.

Kind of a squad based version of the old classic. You use the 1 through 4 keys to select and take command of each ghost, then you use the arrow keys to guide them through the maze and avoid the yellow dot eater. Thing is, while Pac-Man is gobbling up dots, your score goes down. By keeping your ghosts alive, you can minimize the damage and keep him from chomping more. Personally I can’t help feeling a bit like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes. It’s just unnatural.

Larger capacity solid-state drives will be on their way soon from SanDisk. That’s because SanDisk and Toshiba are working together on a new 43-nanometer manufacturing process which will give us SSDs with the same capacity as those of today’s typical 2.5″ hard drives.

Flash memory is the natural replacement for hard drives in ultra-small notebooks like the MacBook Air and Asus Eee PC, because they use less power, generate less heat, and have faster access times than hard drives. The only downside is that as the Gbs go up the cost will get higher.

It was just last week when the Multimedia Card Association introduced the miCARD format to the world. Designed to work with both USB and MMC slots the miCARD can hold up to 2 GB of info presently and the designers speculate the the technology’s upper-limit will be 2 terabytes. The idea is to cram more memory onto the same size of a unit and make it more functional for dual entry ports. Not too shabby for something so small, right?

Pretec is the first company out of the gate to announce its first miCARD series dubbed the S-Diamond. The models will range in storage capacity between 128 MB to 8 GB. No word on availability or prices as of yet.

Source: EverythingUSB