14 DAY TRIAL // Being the sort of company that plays multiple game fields at once, Sony has, this once, turned its gaze towards the portable storage industry, having developed a new flash drive unit.
All segments of the consumer IT market rely, to some extent, on things being new if consumers are to be goaded into maintaining a stable rate of product sales.
In the case of USB flash drives, one could say that this is doubly important, since the market is well past the point where making them small is difficult.
In other words, makers of such things have to focus on versatility, aesthetics and affordability as much as they do on performance and capacity.
Sony's latest attempt at this yielded the Sony Micro Vault P, a flash drive with a storage capacity of up to 64 GB (the minimum is 4 GB).
Like an increasing number of other units of this type, it comes with a strap hole (for attaching a key chain or mobile phone).
The USB connector can be rendered accessible via the Click feature, which doesn't add length to the flash drive body.
Another thing to be mentioned is the 360-degree LED, set at the tip, which shows whether or not data is being written onto the unit.
The 4 GB, 8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB Sony Vault P will start shipping in Asia Pacific sometime around the middle of the ongoing month (July, 2011).
All of them are colored either black or white and feature the File Rescue and x-Pict Story technologies, which allow for file recovery (as the name itself makes it rather clear) and automatic photo presentation creation, respectively.
Unfortunately, even though this is, for all intents and purposes, a formal product announcement, Sony did not actually say how much money prospective buyers need to prepare.