14 DAY TRIAL // Football (or soccer, as it is known to Americans) is the most popular sport in the world, both in terms of players and fans. If you're a fan and want everyone in the world to know, the new flash drives form Apacer might be the thing for you.
Called AH174 Football Mobile Flash Drives, they are meant to celebrate the opening of the 2014 FIFA World Cup.
You would think that the things would be shaped like footballs, and to some extent you would be right, but that's not totally correct.
The flash drives are round (well, hexagonal actually), but they aren't spheres. They're pretty flat actually, as if someone struck them with a large maul straight out of a cartoon.
On the flip side, that will let them blend in as buttons and other minor accessories on your jeans, or it will simply make it easy and comfortable to slip them in a pocket.
Now for what the items can actually do: being USB On The Go devices, they can use anything with USB support as a host device.
Or, in this case, anything with a micro-USB port as a host device. Speaking of which, the AH174 Football Mobile Flash Drives aren't dual-port devices.
So far, most USB OTG flash drives have had two ports, a normal USB connector and a micro-USB port on the other end.
Since the AH174 Football Mobile Flash Drives are so small, however, they only get the small one, which sticks out of the edge.
Color-wise, you'll be able to choose from blue, green and red, all of which have yellow and green fluorescent streaks here and there.
Finally, since environmental friendliness is at an all-time high and only going higher, the casing is made of an eco-friendly silica gel. Whether eco-friendly means biodegradable or just lacking in hazardous compounds is not elaborated upon.
Apacer did say that it expects the case to protect the drives from collision though, not that NAND Flash chips are all that vulnerable to shocks to begin with. For that matter, they aren't exactly big or heavy enough to acquire enough momentum to damage themselves upon hitting something. So as long as you don't stomp on it or anything, you should be fine.
Sadly, USB OTG hasn't been implemented into USB 3.0 (as far as we know), so you'll have to make do with USB 2.0 speeds (480 Mbps). Not such an issue on the 8 GB drive, but might make things tedious on the 16 GB and 32 GB AH174.