My latest gizmo is a
SanDisk U3 Cruzer. I've been meaning to upgrade my 256 meg PenDrive for months now. Having one is like cell-phone syndrome, once you've used one life is never quite the same.
So what is
U3? It looks like a regular memory stick with a standard USB connector on it. However the beauty is it's designed to have applications such as
Skype and
Firefox installed and executed directly on it. All you need do is insert the device into a PC and the inbuilt app launcher kicks into life. The applications then run directly from the U3 drive. No PC installation needed. - It's worth pointing out the apps are not the regular versions. Each has to be packaged to run within a U3 environment.
For me one of the great things about these drives is you can share common apps between multiple PC's - work and home for example. Useful if you don't want to lug you work computer home each night. The main downside is that it's Windows only right now (I'm XP by day Mac by night). Although, there are rumours in the wild of projects which might change this soon.
U3 resources: