14 DAY TRIAL // As it often happens, Team Group has broken its silence to announce a new product, one that doesn't reflect the usual vision, so to speak, of Universal Serial Bus Flash Drives.
The normal USB flash drive is a small, stick-like item that has a plastic shell and a cap, unless the makers of the drive go for a cap-less model.
In the latter case, the USB drive has either a retractable port or some other way of protecting it. Or maybe it doesn't have an exposed port at all.
Team Group did experiment a bit there. It chose to go with something called one-piece cap-less design when it made the Team Group T132. That way, the drive just goes into a USB port and that's it.
Another thing Team Group did was implement some serious design enhancements, like lines from a bird's nest decorating the exterior, and a material processed with sandblasting.
The result of these ministrations was a low-key and “introverted silver glow which further displays the calm tone of natural craftsmanship.”
The hollow interlaced lines soften the hard metal casing, and add the benefit of making the drive hard to slip from your fingers. Given how small the USB stick is, that's always a good thing.
Add to that the new generation COB packaging technology and you have a very small and very light storage device.
For those who don't know, COB stands for Chip-on-Board and is a method of building flash drives that leaves no space between the chips (small themselves) and the shell of the drive.
Combined with a new control chip and the 5 Gbps max bandwidth of USB 3.0, the technology allows the newcomer to read data at 85 MB/s. The write speed wasn't mentioned, but we image it is about half of that, give or take.
Team Group should already be selling the waterproof and dustproof T132 flash drive in 16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB capacities. Prices were not mentioned, sadly.