Refine search for Home

  Leave a comment      Email this to a friend TrustedReviews Newsletters

If you are now sitting thinking that there’s no way you can trust a free public access computer again after such a horror story, well, maybe you need to learn all about U3 smart drives, a company that Benny met up with at CES this year.

U3 drives look like standard common or garden USB memory keys, but have been tweaked to enable them to run software so that the applications they carry can be used on any computer. Documents are saved to the drive, ditto passwords, Web site cookies and so on, and, once you remove a U3 drive from a computer no trace of your activity will remain.

U3 is a year old - it was launched at the huge Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2005, but it hasn’t really entered the public consciousness yet. The whole caboodle is centred on proprietary U3 technology – if a hardware company wants its flash drive to be compatible it has to comply with the hardware specification and if a software developer wants its applications to comply it has to meet standards too.

As with any platform dependent on compliance, there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation at play. What’s the tipping point in terms of market interest that makes it attractive for a software company to bother with the programming effort of supporting U3? The same question goes for the makers of U3 drives.

Several elements combine to tip the scales in this case, including the need for data security, a desire to have synchronised data on a piece of hardware as small and pocket friendly as a USB key, and crossover between potential business and consumer uses which means the market is potentially vast. Oh and the fact that behind the U3 initiative lie SanDisk, and M-systems, both active developers of flash memory.

One of the things that’s interesting at this stage of U3’s development is that the range of software currently compliant includes a lot of free stuff. Highlights include Mozilla’s Thunderbird and Firefox, OpenOffice.org for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, Skype for Voice over IP communications and Trillian for instant messaging.

Add your comment