Memory Hoarder: Recycle Old Memory Cards in a Flash
It seems that no matter how hard we try to keep our tech stuff neat and tidy, we always amass piles and piles of obsolete gadgets. Things like old phone chargers, unneeded discs – and memory cards. Scads of memory cards! This funky design would actually take all of those old microSD cards cluttering up your workspace and turn them into something much more useful: a USB flash drive which is more than the sum of its parts.
Designed by Fang-Chung Tsai, the Collector USB Flash Drive would have its own base amount of memory. Add up to three microSD cards and you have got yourself a decent amount of storage space for only the cost of the original flash drive. The Collector is sadly not in production at the moment, but if this baby ever becomes a real-life gadget there are throngs of geeks out there who would love a storage solution like this
Thinking Thin: Super-Skinny Eco-Friendly Memory Sticks
The humble USB memory stick is anything but stylish, and it is certainly not environmentally friendly. Lovable design group Art Lebedev wants to switch up our view of those easily-lost memory sticks by making them cheaper, smaller, lighter and less environmentally damaging. The concept is called Flashkus, and it mashes high-tech and low-tech together perfectly.
Instead of the usual plastic, these memory sticks would be made of simple cardboard and come four to a perforated card. When you need to store or share information, you just tear one off. You can write directly on the cardboard with a pen, making it simple to keep track of what is stored on each memory stick.
It would be interesting to see whether cardboard would be sturdy enough to protect the data on these storage devices; if so, they could be carried around in wallets or purses until needed. Art Lebedev is famous for coming up with awesome ideas that never make it to production, so we aren’t holding out much hope for this one to be stocked on store shelves anytime soon – but we hope the clever data storage device someday replaces those clunky plastic things we’ve been carrying around for years.
