The people's passion for gold can take some pretty ugly turns sometimes (remember the story of King Midas?), especially when said material is used as a main component in an electronic device. And the latest example of such a more or less fortunate combo comes all the way from Korea, where a company presumably called Younus has just launched a flash drive dubbed "Swing Gold Flash rive" that....yeah, you've guessed it, sports a gold case, but also some pretty interesting technical specs.

Thus, the flash drive sports a swiveling external case, whose purpose is to protect the USB connector while reducing the device's overall size. And since making the whole body out of solid gold would have probably been way too expensive, the manufacturers have decided to try a different approach, and provided this golden aspect just for the external case (actually, we're not sure whether the device is made out of solid gold or just gold-plated, as the Korean website has some very serious translation issues).

However, leaving aside for a moment the blingy design and external looks, the device does provide some interesting technical features. First of all, it's extremely small and portable, as it measures just around 42.9 mm x 17.7 mm x 8.7 mm, at a weight of around 10 grams. Moreover, it provides very high storage capacities, as it is available in 512 MB, 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB and 16 GB models, thus covering all three entry-level, mid-range and high-end market segments.

As any respectable USB flash drive, this thing connects to a computer via an USB 2.0 interface (up to 480 Mbps data transfer rate) and is compatible with the vast majority of operating systems currently installed on the users' computers, ranging from Microsoft's whole OS range (from 98 to Vista) to Mac OS X 9 and above and Linux Kernel 2.4 and above.

The strangest thing about the Swing Gold Flash Drive is its price. Thus, according to the Korean website it's presented on, the 1 GB version of the drive retails just for around 14,200 Won (the equivalent of 15.42 US dollars), which means that the device is most likely just gold-plated.

We are just a few, but there are many of you, Softpedia users, out there. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to create an email address for you to help us a little in finding gadgets we missed. Interesting links are bound to be posted with recognition going mainly to those who submit. The address is .