Joystiq hits the gaming community, specifically the Xbox 360 community, with the type of news that will bring joy to gamers’ pants all over the world. Finally, in the near future, you will be able to hook up your own USB storage device to your Xbox 360.  Now you will have even more space to put all that content you’ve been downloading from Xbox Live. Isn’t that great? Oh but wait, there are some catches. Go past the break to learn them.

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If you were one of the 8 people to win the week long giveaway for the Tyme Machine Star Wars USB drives, you should be receiving yours soon. Thanks again to Tyme Machines for donating these sweet pieces of data.  If you didn’t win and want your own, stop by the Tyme Machine’s website.  I promise that the shipping wont take 2 to 3 months. (Like for our winners.) The USB drives come in 4 different flavors: Yoda, Boba Fett, Darth Vader, and Stormtrooper.  All drives are 4 GBs big.

Ever played a prank on a colleague where someone sends you a graphic nude or perhaps you stumbled across a few ads not quite appropriate for the work environment. Well here’s some bad news for you if that is the case, your employer can attach a usb dongle to your computer and in an hour and a half. It will scan and analyze 70,000 images on your machine. The dongle claims to to also have the ability to scan deleted images and return less than 1% in false positives.

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ThinkGeek does it again!  On sale now are USB Lightsaber thumb drives imported form Japan! Japanese people are so cool. Now, I’m not sure if we are allowed to wield such power in our hands, but I don’t see anywhere on the site that says that you might be a Jedi or a Sith to receive one of these bad boys.

Available in both Jedi green and Sith red.  The lightsaber glows when plugged into a USB slot and provides 1 GB of space for $19.99.

[via ThinkGeek]

 

During CES, Andrew and I actually had some time to walk the show floor between our appointments.  I say “actually” because scheduling appointments within 30 to 45 minutes of each other was a bad idea and one of the lessons I have learned from the event.  While on the show floor, we saw these cute USB drives.  They were so cute that we were actually sucked into the booth and took pictures of FruitShop’s products.

Unlike most plastic USB drives where the animal or character’s head has to be stretched to consolidate for the USB port, these USB drives use silicone.

More info and products at FruitShop

Update: Fixed the link

I had an opportunity to interview Jeff Ravencraft, President of the USB Implementers Forum, about the USB 3.0 “Super Speed” standard. For those who do not know how the USB Implementers Forum works, they do not manufacture the devices. What they DO is “facilitate the development of high-quality compatible USB peripherals (devices), and promote the benefits of USB and the quality of products that have passed compliance testing.” In simpler terms, they make sure that any product with the official USB logo is prime quality.

The new USB 3.0 standard is, as mentioned, ten times faster than the current USB 2.0. In addition, it provides that speed at 1/3 the power consumption due to a rethinking of the polling architecture. That is to say, the polling architecture is out, and a new interrupt based architecture is in. While previous version relied on the host mass broadcasting data to all USB devices, leaving the device to filter out all the noise, the new scheme uses direct communication with the device needed.

Powering devices and charging via USB got a boost as well. New USB 3.0 drives can spin up off the USB power alone, without the aid of an additional power cable. That cable delivers full duplex data transfer as well (compared to the half duplex of USB 2.0) with a boost to 9 cables total over the previous 4.

To accomplish this radical rethinking, everything has been updated, including the devices, hosts and cables. Everything is still, to some degree, backward compatible with USB 2.0 hardware. The ports on USB 3.0 devices will accept the USB 2.0 cords and will fall back to the USB 2.0 architecture and speeds. In action you can see improved data transfer (see video below) and even the ability to stream uncompressed HD video from the camera to the screen, and then to an external USB 3.0 hard drive with no lag what-so-ever.

Now the wait for these devices is…. wait, they are already here! HP, Asus, and Western Digital has all gotten a few certified devices off the assembly line and ready to go. There are 6 months of devices backlogged for approval by the USB Implementers Forum, and we will begin to see this new format take off.

Video of Super Speed USB 3.0 comparison after the break…

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This is something better than that Humping Dog USB, you know why? BECAUSE ITS MARIO! booYAH.

Not only does this short Italian save princesses who are named after fruit, he saves 4GB of your data. Mmmm convienant. Esty, also sells a USB Koopa, Goomba, Shroom, and ALSO a Mario Brick Extension. The only downfall is that you need to cough up $55 to purchase them…EACH, with the exception of the Brick Extension. Worth it? Maybe not, but it would be cute to have a little Mario staring back at you while you download porn to your heart’s content.

Kingston is now letting you stuff your pockets with less money and more portable data storage.  The new DataTraveler comes in 3 sizes. 128GB for $546, a world’s first in portal data storage sizes, 64GB for $213, and 32GB for $120.  If I had a say in renaming these drives, it would be DataTraveler 200 – Baller Series.  Because who in their right minds would buy thumb drives at those prices?  Especially when there are free email and online file storage websites out there. Oh well, I guess when you’re rich, you need things like this to show off.

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First it was the old Ravage turning from panther to a USB drive, now we have Blaster transforming from robot to a fake laptop with a real USB hub under it. I like this new trend of geek gadgets. If you want one, head over to this page and fork up the 3,980 yen.

[source]

Update: I suck. This is Blaster, not Soundwave. -_-;; Flame me in the comment section below. I deserve it.