U3 and Your Flash Drive

U3 is a company established by Sandisk and mSystems. U3 provides usb drives with software inside like Firefox and Migo. The best thing about this is that your software settings and files are synched whenever you use the drive. You can then carry your drive along with your files, IE favorites and other settings. It's like carrying your computer with you at least the basic things like files and bookmarked web pages.

I recently tested the USB Flash Drives shown here specifically the 1GB version of the Memorex U3 Drive. First of all, I am not a techie so I will not pretend I know the detailed technical workings here. I just love covering this technology since it is very useful for lots of people like me. I think my point of view however, will be important since users like me will comprise a bigger share of the market for U3.

The U3 somehow treats itself as a CD-ROM and a USB drive at the same time. It launches a USB icon at the systems bar and also says that the PC recognizes a CD-ROM. When one uses the Memorex U3 drive for the first time, you will get to see an animated presentation of how the U3 generally works. A woman character talks about the U3 and the software you will mostly spend time on with which is the Launchpad.

I just told you that I am not a techie but I fairly know computers and navigating through software is generally easy for me. But if I did not listen to the presentation in its entirety, I might have miss a very important thing in interacting with the U3 Launchpad.

After you finished with the U3, unlike an ordinary USB drive, you must first click at the "EJECT" button located at the lower right corner of the Launchpad. This is to turn off the launchpad and avoid corrupting the software. I think that if I did not listen to tutorial, I might have yanked the drive once I'm done.

Next I tried downloading an application from the net and I chose the Maxthon browser. It was fairly easy and straight forward. See the graphic below.


Great things about the U3:

- Synching files with the Migo Software is really easy and can be done in a snap.
- Ability to bring important files anywhere without a laptop.
- Plugging it into another PC is also easy along with the other software and files that you put into it.

Needs Improvement
- The drive can be fairly slow when ran for the first time but its up to speed on successive runs.
- The tutorial always starts-up when you plug the drive. You need to disable autorun manually.
- The file I downloaded was also on autorun mode so I have to disable it as well.
- Migo can only synch IE favorites and not yet Firefox. I tried including the Firefox bookmark in the synching tasks but still nothing appears on my Firefox for the U3 drive. In case you know how please tell me.

Visit: Official U3 Website

Technorati tags: USB / USB Drive / USB FlashDrive / Flash Drive / U3 Drive / U3 USB Drive / U3 Flash Drive /Memorex Drive /U3 Memorex Drive