20 most worthless pieces of junk: #14 -- Giveaway thumb drives
Filed under: Technology
Attend enough conferences, grand openings and midnight releases and you'll come to know one of the most useless pieces of junk I know of; free thumbdrives. When thumb drives first entered the corporate and customer swag world, a free 128MB thumbdrive was the coolest thing in the world. It held 80 times what a floppy disk used to and fit neatly in one's pocket. The free thumbdrive was at one time the hippest piece of plastic you could attach a corporate logo to, but now the only practical uses I've found for my thumbdrives is to steady a shaky table or prop open an automatically locking door.Now that people are carrying full length movies and albums around on thumbdrives instead of word documents, small-capacity drives don't cut it. Especially since you can buy a 16 GB thumbdrive for close to $30 which has as much memory as most iPhones.
Sadly thumb drive giveaway prizes haven't kept up with the evolving needs of their users. Now instead of me flashing a Hornitos Tequila thumb drive everywhere I go, it sits on my shelf of worthlessness along with several other branded thumbdrives. Not only does the small capacity of the drives hold them back, but thanks to the ongoing miniaturization of such technology it's damn near impossible to plug these monsters into most computers with recessed USB ports.
Further relegating promotion thumbdrives to the junk drawer is the prevalence of free online storage from companies like DropBox and Box.net who offer 2GB and 1GB of free online storage respectively. Companies looking to brand themselves would be better off sponsoring online file storage at one of these companies than investing in the thumbdrives that can barely contain an album purchased from iTunes!
If companies still want to give away thumbdrives, do it right and don't give out anything smaller than a 2 GB drive unless you only want to advertise to the other items on my shelf of worthlessness!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-09-2009 @ 8:28AM
cliff corson said...
the chepo flash drives do have a fair amount of uses beyond being small.
I've never had any trouble using them in any computer with the exception of some laptop systems.
many elementry schools want students to use smaller flash drives and during the back to school season these things sell great in stores. True a 128KB space is small when compared to the larger units but if you want to store important documents that you don't want everyone to see when you plug in the device it is good to have a couple smaller units lying around
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7-09-2009 @ 11:56AM
jmac said...
They are great to send new family pictures and short videos to soldiers stationed overseas. You can send them often and don't have to wait until they are filled up. It means a lot to them and makes them feel more included in family events.
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7-09-2009 @ 12:16PM
C Razenson said...
Thumb drive give aways are a great item. Yes they old 128 are not good but giving a two gig one is great and for 9 to 10 dollars its not bad to have your logo on an item people want and would use.
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7-13-2009 @ 1:19PM
Rei said...
Smaller flash drives are great for keeping in purses, backpacks, cars. Have you ever gone to reach for your flash drive to realize, in horror, that you've left it behind? Having a small one as a backup is really useful. Having multiple small ones to leave in various bags, etc is fantastic.
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7-15-2009 @ 8:22AM
god_forbids said...
You are a fool if you think that small USB drives have no use. Observe:
http://lifehacker.com/5266661/turn-your-spare-thumb-drives-into-feature+packed-giveaway-drives
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7-15-2009 @ 8:35AM
Josh Smith said...
I'm well aware of that article, but for people who aren't constantly bumping into new people it isn't something that is practical.
From my experience anyone I would have given the small thumbdrive needed way more anti virus/spyware/malware software than I could fit on it.
If they are useful to you I'm glad to hear it!
7-18-2009 @ 5:45PM
mookumookumooku said...
If everyone thought this 'upgrade to the the next best thing' was something to brag about, no one would have downgraded back to XP when Vista came out.
I mean, sure it's not the best piece of equipment, but barely any of the computers you buy in the store come with the best graphics card for the current time line. It's always1-3 upgrades behind that you could actually see, given you take an extra 3 minutes to check. Companies never take the time to make sure you're getting the latest, they always want you to buy more and this is an exact replica of that tactic.
Seriously, the thing takes up what, two inches of space compared to that dead ink pen on your desk?
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7-22-2009 @ 11:39AM
Caroline Withers said...
They are great for students to turn in PowerPOint assignments or something else when "their printer broke".
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