Introduction
USB flash drives are a very popular USB peripheral with millions sold annually. Who can blame the masses who voted with their dollars for this as their floppy drive replacement? Their convenient size, ease of use, and ability to load and unload data, all without loading drivers make them extremely useful. Computer users can easily move their data from computer to computer in ways only dreamed about five years ago. There are an almost countless number of brands and models of USB flash drives on the market today. This makes these USB peripherals a favorite category of device to test here at LIVEdigitally. Today we have the opportunity to test the Ridata EZDrive USB 2.0 Flash Drive Pro. Ridata is a division of Ritek, best known for their optical media. We evaluated the 1 GB version of the drive, which is the largest available currently in Ridata’s product line. Continue reading
Props to Sprint for a few news items: yesterday they became the first U.S. company to offer music downloads over a cellular network, besting the Apple/Motorola ROKR’s circuitous “iTunes-to-pc-to-phone” route. Puh-leeze. The dilly: at launch, subscribers have access to some 250k songs from the stables of EMI, Sony/BMG, Warner and Vivendi’s Universal; for $2.50 you get two copies of the song (read: a tinny phone version and one for your PC). Downloads are available to those with EV-DO phones (i.e. those with wireless broadband), which at the moment are only Samsung’s MM-A940 and Sanyo’s MM-9000 phones. With the record labels continually fighting with Steve Jobs over iTunes’ $.99 song price, I’m sure some execs are smiling about Sprint charging $2.50 for a single song (get real – the phone version doesn’t count). With a very small user base and a pricing structure 2.5x greater than the market leader, this has some hurdles to overcome, but Sprint is the first one out there. Check 