Kingston U3 Data Traveller (1GB) - (Review)

I’ve always thought pen drive’s were quite expensive. I Remember i bought one about 2 years ago. Admittedly, it was a rubbish one, and it was bought so i can transfer saves between my PS2 & PC. It was a ‘Max Drive‘ usb pen stick, and it held a whopping 16mb! WOW! Now, i paid £20 for this, and that price is exactly why i thought pen drives were expensive!

Last year, i noticed my boss had one sitting on his desk, which he hadn’t used in a long time, so i nabbed it off him. It was a marked improvement over my 16mb unit as it held a blistering 64mb! However, it took it back off me 2 months ago.

Now at work, i’ve got a few gig’s worth of files that i have accumulated over the years, which i want to ferry back to my home PC. Rather than burn CD’s everyday, i thought i’d look at Pen Drives again to see if the price had dropped!.. I was shocked to say the least.

eBuyer was offering a Kingston U3 Datatraveller 1GB for £13 ish! 1GB for £13 was fantastic. Add on delivery & VAT, and it came to arond £18! I was amazed to say the least! So i quickly ordered one, and 4 day’s later, i had my gig pen drive in my hand, and my, oh my, it’s a dinky little thing.

There’s not much you can really say about pen drives. They plug into the USB socket, and they carry data. Mine has not had any problem’s what-so-ever. It hold’s the data, it does exactly what i wanted it to do!

The real bonus though, was the U3 compatability. Now i’ve never heard of this until i read up on it. Basically, it’s a technology which allows you to run programs from your USB pen drive. Fantastic. The Datatraveller comes bundled with 3 trial programs, but visiting u3.com allows you to download more free & trial programs aswell as buying them!

So far, my U3 is running Foxit (PDF Reader), EssentialPIM (tasks, contacts, calender etc.), Editpad Lite (notepad type program) And filezilla (an FTP Client). Now these are really handy if i need to run a program from someone else’s computer. There’s loads of other programs that you can buy, however, i like free stuff, so im not really interested!!!

My only gripe with it is that transfer is quite slow, which is a shame, but i usually tend to start teh transfer between pendrive & PC (or vice versa) and then walk away so speed doesn’t really bother me!

So yeah, that’s my U3 datatraveller, I would certainly recommend one, and for £20, you cant really go wrong can you?