Santa Cruz Snowboard USB Flash Drive
There I was, wandering through the isles of another big-box store when what should my eye behold? A techno item I hadn't previously heard about? (and a cool-ish one at that!)
There, hanging off its poorly security protected peg was a flash drive that looked like a snow board! Not just a snowboard, but one with some really rad graphics to boot! Apparently, they also have surf board and skate board models, but there were no skate boards or I would have bought one.
Front Package propoganda included:
"4GB"
"100% Compatible"
"2 Year Warranty"
"Extras - Videos, Wallpapers and More"
Nice! All that and a cool package to boot? My kid will think this is cool even if technically it sucks, so I bought one.
Upon opening the package, I noted that it had a very silky feel to it, and looked to have high quality. Let's take a look at the goodies!
I decided to give it a whirl on my Linux computer - after all - it is 100% Compatible!
Nothing special happened - no fancy videos came up. I was just a little disappointed.
Perhaps it means it is 100% Windows compatible?
One more test - does it autoboot in Windows?
I plugged the snowdrive into my XP computer. Again Nothing special happened. Bummer!
Now that the drive has lost its thrill factor for me - I proceded to look things over.
The "4 GB" drive only had 3.8GB Free Space, which means 200 MB of whatever is filling up my new drive.
What is on the drive that is using up this space?
On the drive were the following 7 files and 5 directories:
Files:
ActionSportsDrives.html
ACTIONSPORTS.ICO
AUTORUN.INF
AUTORUNNOLAUNCH.INF
AUTORUNLAUNCH.INF
Auto Launch ON-OFF Disabler.exe
SCSnow_Splash.jpg
Directories:
Wallpaper Pics
My Files
My Photos
My Music
My Videos
Well, being a movie buff, I went directly to the My Videos folder and to my surprise saw 1 lame, low definition quicktime video of what looks to be one individual doing some less than spectacular moves on a snowboard. No triple backflips. No jumping over a helicopter. No spectacularly bloody crashes. Just one guy on a board. The word "Lame" comes to mind.
Perhaps the backgrounds would be better? So I migrated into the Wallpaper Pics folder.
There I found 10 pics. 2 of which were "Android" backgrounds - My Cell phone doesn't have a "USB Port" I could plug this into. The most spectacular thing I saw here was the snow. Other than that - the pics were nothing short of lame.
In short - Nice packaging, poor implementation. Next time get some guys that can actually snowboard, use a camera crew that knows how to make good videos, and use formats that look good on my high definition screen!
Not a complete loss though. Perhaps if my kid doesn't want to play with it, I can wipe the drive and actually use it for file storage?