Features Summary

The arrival of the ThumbDrive in our labs certainly turned heads, and created an instant "must have product" feeling amongst all of us. A word of warning to Hugh Symons Group plc who kindly loaned us the product and who are the official distributors of it in the UK: "Sorry Chaps your are going to earn your stripes to prise this one away from us!"

The ThumbDrive measurements are impressive: 57mm(L) x 17mm(W) x 10mm(H), comes in retail packaging, and you even get a necklace holder to carry your personal ThumbDrive around in, a sleeve that covers the USB connector to prevent any accidental damage occurring to the port, and a floppy disk containing the drivers needed for instant recognition in Windows. The attention paid to detail for the ThumbDrive is admirable.

The ThumbDrive is feature rich, weight a mere 30 grams, plug and play via USB port, Non Moving parts, solid state manufactured using non-volatile Flash Memory with a little or no risk of damage, Easy to use and simple to install, Excellent Capacity configuration from 8Mb, 16Mb, 32Mb, 64Mb, 128Mb, 256Mb, Compact, neat, Light and low power consumption under active and suspend modes, USB support hence no external power supply required, Write-lock tab, supports any PC based platforms including Notebooks with USB ports, with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 support only. We also tested the product on Windows Me and encountered no compatibility issues, Windows 95 on the other hand is supported, but you will need the correct version with USB support, Windows NT on the other hand does not support USB and hence not supported. Moving and storing data could not be simpler. The downside? just a few: easy to prise away from the port no external security, we would have liked to have seen some kind of password protection in case the drive gets in to the wrong hands at least your data would be protected, comes with an LED on the face of the unit which flashes red when you are copying data but if your USB port is at the back of the unit you are unable to monitor it's activity, the only way to resolve this would have been to have software monitoring it's activity displaying the information on the screen. It is obvious to compare the product to the likes of Zip, external Orb's and CompactFlash drives, but to be totally ruthless, this is a unique product in terms of design, portability and ease of use, although the cost element does play a part, it should not be your top priority, as it has too many good features to just dismiss on grounds of cost alone.

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