U3, as we said…is gone. Sandisk, which owns the product…has decided to discontinue the product. We always had a problem with it. It tended to take too long to load…was much too slow.

We had recommended the menu launcher and accompanying open-source software from www.portableapps.com. The menu takes very little in terms of system resources and it is optional…the programs there can run without it.

Sandisk, however, has announced it will replace U3 with a new software and hardware solution. For this, they have joined forces with Microsoft. The new offering is expected to be commercially available in the second half of 2008. It will include TrustedFlash security technology. TrustedFlash embeds digital rights management software on the card instead of the player. We are not about to embark on another diatribe against the inconvenience of DRM…but having it on the media instead of the player can be an advantage.

GigaOm directed us to another product…MojoPac…which we hadn’t previously noticed. MojoPac allows you to install almost any application to a USB 2.0 compliant storage device, including iPods, USB hard drives, USB flash memory drives, etc. One downside is that the current version requires administrative privileges on the Host PC. U3 did not, nor do the PortableApps menu launcher. MojoPac is working on the issue for future versions though…although most solutions require the cooperation of the administrator.

We’ve been experimenting with bootable USB drives that can either act using the PortableApps series of open source portable applications or boot a complete Linux or Windows based operating system…We’ll have more on this later.