SanDisk USB SD Card

I’m not sure how they came up with this one, but SanDisk’s new Ultra II SD Plus memory card is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in awhile. When my friend sent me the link, my jaw about dropped at the ingenuity and simplicity of it all.

David Pogue writes about it in his Circuits Newsletter:

"It turns out that SanDisk’s SD Plus is a card with a twist—or, rather, a fold. Even though the card itself is smaller than a postage stamp, it’s been built with teeny, tiny hinges. And when you fold it back on itself, you reveal a set of metal contacts that you can insert directly into the U.S.B. jack of your Mac or PC.

The card doesn’t have an actual U.S.B. connector of the sort you find at the end of your camera’s cable; it dispenses with the outer rectangle frame. All that really counts, it turns out, is those metal contacts.

That’s it. The computer sees the card as an external drive—a flash drive, just as though you’d inserted the card into a card reader—and you can download the photos just as you always do. Except you’ve completely eliminated the need for an additional piece of gear that bridges your camera and your computer."

Now, that is something I call handy. And it looks like it’s not much more than the regular SD version. Amazing.

A Brilliant New Memory Card [NYTimes.com: Circuits Newsletter]

Die Dulci Fruere