The first USB flash drives didn’t have much capacity, but the prospect of being able to carry data on such a small device made them instantly attractive. Today, one-to-four gigabyte drives are common with 10+ GB drives coming on-stream. Having so much capacity at hand opens up new possibilities for portability. But it’s not just about having all your data in your pocket. Ironically, it’s re-opened a quest – one that dates back to the PC’s infancy – for application portability as well. It’s about putting your entire computing life on a data stick.

Apps to go

Carrying your data with you on a flash drive is fine, but what if you want to open or work on a file? This is the simple reason why most of us schlep around notebook computers. The idea behind portable applications is that you can carry both the data and the application that created it on a flash drive. Publicly accessible computers in Internet cafes, libraries and other locations complete the equation. Sit yourself down with your favourite low-foam no-fat beverage, pop in the USB drive, and you can replicate your working environment on any public PC.

If you buy a USB flash drive today, it may carry a little U3 logo, along with the moniker “U3 smart drive.” I’m currently testing a 4GB Memorex TravelDrive, which is U3-enabled. The TravelDrive, like other U3 smart drives, has a special flash drive controller and U3 system software called the Launchpad pre-installed into a read-only partition that the computer sees as a CD. The Launchpad resembles the Windows Start panel and serves a similar function: to launch special U3 applications and utilities.

The list of U3-enabled applications is growing. Shipping on the Memorex unit are a file synchronization program called Migo and the open-source mail client, Thunderbird. However, if you click on the “download applications” icon that appears in the Launchpad, you are taken to a U3 software site where many other open source, free and commercial titles are available in portable U3 versions. Like a shareware site, these are organized according to software category so it is easy to navigate and find applications like Skype or Winamp.

U3 is a proprietary system. You, as a user, can’t install it on an ordinary flash drive; you need to buy a U3-enabled flash drive. However, there are alternatives to U3. One that I have been using for a couple of months is simply called the PortableApps Suite from PortableApps.com This one is freely downloadable and doesn't need any special hardware enablement like U3 does, so it will work on any USB flash drive. The suite comes with a broad selection of applications, including portable versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, ClamWin antivirus and a few others. Plus, there is a list of other applications you can add including a portable version of Gimp image editor, a media player and even something called Mac-on-a-Stick, which allows you to run a Mac Classic OS from a USB drive.

U3 and the PortableApps Suite aren't compatible with Mac. However, the Free Open Source Software Mac User Group (FreeSMUG) offers a similar suite of open source portable applications for Mac OSX.
Microsoft and other major commercial titles are conspicuously absent from the list of portable apps, but if you can live without them, you could carry your entire computing environment on a USB drive – at least that's the theory. How does it work in practice? Before the last trade show I attended, I bought a one gigabyte USB drive and loaded it with the PortableApps Suite, then ported my Thunderbird mail store from my desktop PC to Thunderbird Portable. Every time I went to the media room, I sat at a different computer, but by plugging in the USB key, I had access to my main mailbox and all the stories I was currently working on. The typical pressroom PC comes with MS Office, but had this not been the case, the portable version of OpenOffice on the USB drive gave me a full-featured productivity suite. Had I chosen to, I also could have moved my Firefox bookmarks into the portable version.

In short, it worked well – pretty much seamlessly except for some redundant folders added by Thunderbird Portable that I can’t get rid of, and some minor message duplication when I synced the two mailboxes. The suite plus my mailbox took about half the drive’s capacity, leaving around 500 megabytes free for data files – more than enough for the work I wanted to carry with me. I will be taking the Memorex drive with me on the next few trips, but I expect the U3 experience will be very similar. Plus, the drive’s greater capacity will leave me with more than three gigabytes of capacity rattling around in my pocket.

Is this just a silly diversion? Maybe not. According to an IDG News Service report, at the beginning of the next school year about 175,000 high school students in Paris will be getting USB keys loaded with a number of open-source applications such as FireFox web browser, Thunderbird mail client and OpenOffice productivity suite. Most of what they need for academic life –files as well as the applications to work on them – will be on the key, allowing them to do homework anywhere. A side benefit to the schools is that the freely available applications will reduce the incidence of software piracy.

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Has anyone seen that little key thing?

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