I decided to use my earphones with my iPhone the other day and when I reached into the drawer to grab them there was a huge knot that resulted in a mass of earphones, computer mice, and paper clips coming out of the drawer. It took me a good ten minutes to untangle the mess and I wished for something to prevent that from happening again.

A new device is being offered called the Earbud Yo-Yo that is designed to keep your earbuds from being tangled inside your desk, purse, or brief case. It’s easy to see where the products name came from when you look at the device; it looks like a yo-yo minus the string.

Sometimes it’s really hard to make a decision. Sometimes you need a scapegoat, so you can blame someone else for something that you know is a bad idea. Traditionally, that’s where the magic 8-ball has always come in handy. It has now been combined with this cool little USB flash drive from The USB Group.

This way, you’ll always have storage and an easy answer at your fingertips. It’s a fully logo brandable drive with a cute magic 8 ball suspended in liquid. Should I delete my porn? “Ask again later” Will my co-workers find my High School Musical tracks? “My sources say no”.

The SSD is slowly becoming more and more of a match for the traditional HDD. One of the key complaints about SSDs compared to a traditional HDD is that of storage capacity. One of the other key complaints is price, the typical SSD costs much more than a comparable HDD.

Toshiba has announced its latest SSD line that includes the industry’s first 512GB SSD. That much storage capacity puts the SSD up there with some of the largest traditional HDDs aimed at notebook users. The 2.5-inch 512GB SSD is built using Toshiba’s 43nm NAND technology.

LaCie’s latest offering makes their flash drives more portable, though you’ll need to be careful that you don’t unwittingly spend it.

It’s thicker than a coin, but the metal exterior of the USB 2.0 drive provides the illusion, thereby making it easy to lose in a pocket full of change, or worse, in some stores register. It will cost you $20 for the 4GB version and $30 for the 8GB version. Not a bad price for the sizes, so you won’t mind too much when you accidentally pay for something with it and some dude at Walmart has some free pics of your wife…

Celebrate Han’s not so eternal Carbonite nap with this USB flash drive. Although I don’t remember Han’s legs looking all frog-like. I also don’t remember Leia looking like a Hobbit. Still, it’s fairly adorable in a Star Wars Babies kind of way. We hope that this drive will hold your data better and longer then it held Han. 1 full GB of data/carbonite for $25.

We had heard talk about Samsung’s 256GB solid state drive back in May and it appears that today the talk has finally come true. Samsung has announced they are now officially manufacturing the large Flash-based drive, and we can tell you it’s fast. What we can’t tell you yet is how much it costs.

The speed of the 256GB drive is double that of Samsung’s 64GB and 128GB drives in what Samsung is calling “…disruptive performance”, with sequential read rates of 220MB/s and write rates of 200 MB/s. Applications can launch as much as 10 times faster than a 7200rpm notebook HDD with speeds that would be similar to a 15,000rpm drive.

It’s funny to see what type of person uses what USB flash drive. It says a lot about your personality. Jacques Cousteau would love the Squid flash drive, while Mahjong fans would want the Mahjong tile flash drive. But when it comes to a BBQ flash drive, who ya gonna call? George Foreman comes to mind, but he’d have to juggle it with the real thing and not get them confused.

They contain 2GB of storage space and you can choose from BBQ pork or drumstick versions. The pork will cost you $9.99 while the drumstick costs a couple dollars more. Compared to the real thing these have twice the data and 100% less fat.

Mahjong tiles can be considered an art form, just like the game and now you can get in on the action with a Mahjong USB flash drive. It’s called the MahjongDisk and it’s a handcrafted USB flash drive made to look like three Mahjong tiles stacked together.

Thing is at $400 you might as well just make your own. The $400 drive is constructed from wood and available in 8GB or 16GB capacities. The Lan-Xue model will retail for another $100 compare to the Li-Shui, and both use materials found in classic Chinese furniture. Read and write speeds have been rated at 18MB/s and 15MB/s. The price includes getting them engraved with whatever you like, with something like, “I paid $400 and all I got was this lousy USB flash drive”.

You know, I don’t know what this says about us as a society, but for some reason this gadget truly exists. What we have here is an authentic beer-filled USB flash drive that even features 3D “optional customizable floating objects” inside. With this liquid storage device you can celebrate your love of beer by always having some with you.

And if things ever get too dry and you find yourself in need of a hit, I’m sure you could break it and get just enough booze to wet your beak. Though I wouldn’t recommend it, you don’t wanna choke on those “optional customizable floating objects”. Storage size ranges from 128 MB to 8GB. You might also want to be careful that you don’t crack it and feed your laptop beer.

Nintendo has come up with a solution to the number one issue that Wii gamers face. Storage. And yes the solution is obvious. During the Japan fall press conference they announced that in the spring of 2009, gamers can expect the ability to load and play software directly from an SD card in your SD slot, as well as download items directly to the SD card. There’s a 2GB maximum, so you’ll want to stock up on 2GB SD cards. I guess it’s better then another peripheral to clutter up our lives.

External storage is important for backing up your files and other content on your computer. If you take lots of digital photos or video that you archive, you can eat through lots of storage capacity very quickly. It’s always best to buy as large an external hard drive as you can afford. Today SimpleTech has announced upgrades to connectivity and capacity for some of its external HDDs.

Both the SimpleTech Pro Drive and the SimpleTech Duo Pro Drive have been upgraded to include eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB 2.0 connectivity options. SimpleTech also offers a PCI expansion card for computers that lack eSATA connectivity.

When many of us think of hard drives, we immediately think of notebook and desktop computers where storage capacities can reach into the terabyte level. Storage capacities are equally important for smaller devices like MP3 players and camcorders.

Toshiba has announced a new 1.8-inch hard drive today that is the world’s first dual disc 1.8-inch 240GB HDD and the world’s first 120GB single platter hard drive. The new 240GB HDD is Toshiba part number MK2431GAH. The drive spins at 4200 RPM and offers a 33% improvement in energy consumption compared to Toshiba’s 160GB 3600 rpm 1.8-inch drive.

The SSD offers some nice benefits to the notebook users like increased battery life, faster boot times, and quieter operation. The catch is that at this time SSDs are significantly more expensive than comparable hard drives and the storage capacity of the typical SSD is low.

Intel has jumped into the SSD market with the introduction of a pair of SSDs aimed at consumers. The new SSDs include the X18-M and the X25-M. The X18-M is a 1.8-inch drive and the X25-M is a more traditional 2.5-inch size drive. Intel says that the improved performance of the SSD helps reduce bottlenecks between its CPUs and the storage system. This is the SSD used in the HP system claiming 24-hours of runtime.

Fans of Japanese manga Evangelion will love this USB flash drive inspired by the series so much that they’ll toss their old flash drives aside. Then there are those who will keep it in the box and preserve it like an Egyptian mummy in the hopes that it is a collector’s item that will make them rich one day. Dream big my geek friends. Dream big. When was the last time you heard someone say, “I’m so glad I kept that USB drive in the box. It made me the millionaire I am today.” Whatever the case, the flash drive is designed like the Mecha’s cockpit and will come in 2GB capacities. Just use the damn thing!

Today Transcend introduced it’s new 64GB JetFlashV20 high-capacity USB flash drive. The device claims to provide seamless data exchange between different operating systems including Windows, Mac and Linux. Users can download and install Transcend’s free JetFlash software pack onto the V20 flash drive to enable V20 to automatically log on to website accounts, temporarily lock the computer to prevent unauthorized access. At 64GB, you can store a ton of data in this little drive with a fast USB 2.0 data transfer. It comes bundled with JetFlash software including Website AutoLogin, PC-Lock, Mobile Favorites, Secret-Zip, E-Mail, DataBackup, and Online Update