It’s hard to believe that just a few years ago, USB dongles were a luxury gadget of the corporate worker. Flash forward to 2008, my desk drawer is a septic tank for the turd gadgets. Sure, they’re useful on the few occasions you actually need one, but they’re all the same and practically come in Crackerjack boxes these days. The situation’s so bleak that the only way USB disk key manufacturers can figure out how to distinguish their thumb drives is by crafting them in successively ‘wacky’ shapes. USB thumb drives? The refrigerator magnet of computer gadgets.
But I like PNY’s latest attempt to separate itself from the competition. Their new Ghostbusters 2GB USB drive has, what do you know, the full 1984 horror comedy already loaded on the drive. Preloading thumbdrives with content isn’t a bad incentive to sell one to your average Wal-Mart shopper. Unfortunately, for that to work, you’d really need to make these DVD priced… which PNY’s $60+ offering decidedly is not.
And hell, the drive isn’t even shaped like an Ernie Hudson bobblehead.
Insert ‘Ghostbusters’ song reference here: PNY offers movie on USB [Crave]
I bought a $40 2Gig drive, but it’s shaped like Ravage from the old Transformers series, and it transforms into the drive. He’ll make a nice addition to my collection of toys.
Some guy brought a flash-drive marketing idea to a party and it went berserk.
Choose and die.
Where’d you pull the price from? I can’t find that reference…
They could easily pull off a DVD price with a 2GB preloaded flash drive. I just bought an 8GB Super Talent Pico-C for $25. 2GB flash drives sell sub-$10 online. Ghostbusters is $11 at Amazon. $30 for a novelty item like this would probably sell at Wal-Mart, where flash drives are overpriced anyway.
At $60 it seems like Sony wants “proof” that Movies on USB aren’t viable.
I could buy a 2gb thumbdrive, and Ghostbusters on DVD, for less than $60. WTF were they thinking?
Sales: You know, it’s just occurred to me that we really haven’t had a successful test of this equipment.
Engineering: I blame myself.
Marketing: So do I.
My big question in all this is what format is the movie in? Should I already know? I can’t find it anywhere in the few places I’ve seen this story
Where does this $60 come from… only one place I can find it at the moment in the world, and thats in the UK – apparently it’s an exclusive, lucky them lol. Knowin the company they will probably halve the price at least anyway ASAP