Kingston 1GB mini MIGO edition good portable gadget
Strengths:small, light weight, portable, migo software to sync PC, no cap design
Weaknesses:low transfer speed, the end has lanyard but kingston does not provide belt, no cap mechanism seems flimsy
Posted May 26, 2007 - I give this product a three star, I'm semi-satisfied with the product so far, it has some strength, but the biggest weakness is its transfer rate. As soon as I plug in the drive and transferred some large files (>100M), I noticed that it takes quite a while to transfer, later I tried the migo software to sync between my PCs, it also took a while to load the document settings stuff. Later when I was doing the rebate, on the Kingston rebate form I noticed that Kingston does NOT advertise it as high speed USB 2.0 flash drive. The drive utilizes a non-cap slide locking mechanism, which is good design to eliminate the hassle of losing the caps, but the locking mechanism is kind of flimsy (the sliding shell to protect the USB port has a very loose fit) and the constructions are all plastic, I’m afraid that after constant lock/unlock the locking tips will be broken…
One thing besides the size, the migo software is the reason why I gave this product a shot. The migo software is basically a sync program which can save all your windows settings (IE/firefox bookmarks, my documents, outlook emails, etc) on the flash drive, later load the personal settings to another PC. It's quite a convenient way to get all your PCs straight. Since it's a software based solution, I have to mention the U3 technology and the open source PortableApps(portableapps.com/...), these two basically provide a bunch of green softwares (yes they do take a large portion of drive space but since the drives are fairly large you are not going to use all the spaces anyway...) which do NOT require any installation so that you can run directly from the flash drive, and they are also kind of portable tweaked, which makes them run faster than those installed versions. The U3 technology is used on various flash drive brands, including Kingston, the PortableApps achieves the same functionality as U3 while adds more customization on the software and can be installed on any flash drives. Compare to U3 and PortableApps, migo takes another approach to emphasize on data synchronization, especially the whole windows environment. To me, the U3 and PortableApps are more valuable; migo is just not very useful, but you may find that syncing a complete windows environment in seconds is more valuable.
Final thoughts:
At this stage, a non USB 2.0 high speed flash drive seems to be quite old technology, I would NOT recommend this product to other people...
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It is an interesting design.
