There's Something Fishy About These USB Drives ...

The market for USB flash drives is an ever-expanding universe of novelty. New casings — using colorful, translucent plastics, or rhinestone bling, or even bulletproof materials — dramatically improve upon that monotone silver-gray color ubiquitous to electronic devices. Some drives have abandoned rectangular casings altogether in favor of nostalgic shapes, such as teddy bears and rubber duckies.

And then there are the edibles: A Japanese company, Solid Alliance, has gadget geeks drooling with its line of Sushi Disk USB flash drives (1 GB), which look and feel uncannily like the real thing, rice and all. Each piece emulates the normal size of sushi pieces, large enough to be either one really big, shove-it-in-your-mouth bite, or two smaller bites. Texture-wise, the drives featuring large salmon roe (ikura) and sea urchin (uni) are wrapped in a sheath of nori (seaweed) that feels convincingly rough and slightly bumpy. The mackerel sushi is topped with finely chopped green onion and a tiny dollop of grated ginger; two slices of cucumber are tucked into the large roe and uni pieces.

A high-gloss finish seals in hand-painted accents, such as a vein running down the center of the uni's soft flesh, and the silvery skin of the mackerel. Plugging in a sushi flash drive offers one last, startling surprise: A red light inside the sushi piece flickers at an irregular pulse as the drive connects to the computer.

Last month, a Hong Kong-based tech company, Brando, released a picnic's worth of new USB flash drives in the shapes of hamburgers and pizza slices, chicken wings and little drumsticks, watermelon wedges, strawberries, and assorted cookies. Smaller, cheaper, and with four times the memory (4 GB), these new edibles best the Sushi Disk series in all categories but one: realism. The painting on the hamburger is splotchy and imprecise, and only one side of the watermelon wedge is textured to give the semblance of that pulpy fruit. (The other side is just smooth plastic, from the bottom of the factory mold.) The barbecue series proves that Brando clearly has bravado, but it will take a certain kind of customer to enjoy the odd, gummy feeling of the faux meat products.

Still, these unconventional baubles can offer laughs, memories, and memory, literally. After this taste test, one thing's clear: There's plenty of room on the table for more.

Sushi Disk drives ($49-$99) are available at dynamism.com. Brando's food series of drives ($28) is available at usb.brando.com.hk.