SanDisk Cruzer Contour Looks Hip
A First Look at SanDisk's Well Designed USB Drive
SanDisk is taking the ugly out of USB flash drives with the recent availability of its Cruzer Contour USB drive. This drive has curves and stores your data.
It’s not every day you come across a USB flash drive which turns heads as you whip it out of a laptop bag. One which very well could do that is SanDisk’s new Cruzer Contour.
As the name Contour implies this drive is designed with great looks in mind. You get a glossy back top and silver metallic body. This body houses an innovative design – a sliding USB connector. You can use your thumb to gently slide the top of the drive back and forth to display or hide the connector. One added side benefit of this is that there’s no drive end cap to lose. Another nice touch is that when the drive is connected to a computer blue LEDs illuminate the word Cruzer on the drive’s top.
The Cruzer Contour, available in 4GB and 8GB storage capacities, prices at around $100 and $190 respectively. You get for your dollars, besides a fancy look, a USB 2.0 drive which has reported fast read and write speeds. Write speed is rated at 18MB/second, while read speed is clocked at two thirds faster for a data transfer rate of 25MB/second. The write speed, says SanDisk, is double the amount of its previous high-end retail model.
This drive, in addition to solid data transfer rates, supports the ReadyBoost feature found in Microsoft Windows Vista. This feature makes use of available storage space on the Cruzer Contur to enhance overall system performance. SanDisk says this holds true even when several applications are running in Vista at the same time.
As with any good USB drive these days the Cruzer Contour comes with software installed on it to help make your daily computer tasks a little easier. In this particular case the drive is loaded with U3 technology. This special offering lets you run compatible software programs directly from the drive itself, freeing up computer resources such as hard drive space for other tasks. When you plug the drive in, you can gain access to your personal preferences such as documents, bookmarks, wallpaper and more.
U3 applications which come included on the Cruzer Contour are Internet telephone service Skype, software which synchronizes a PC and the flash drive, a password manager, photo management software, some anti-virus software and a few games. Password protection software is also integrated onto the flash drive. This, along with AES hardware encryption, is designed to protect the content of the drive from prying eyes.
The SanDisk Cruzer Contour works with both Windows and Mac computers.
