USB flash drives are nothing new and they’ve been offering some sort of secure partition or encryption for a while now. Some of them have even used fingerprint recognition. But guess what – the security functions of them all are completely useless on anything except the PC you’ve installed the drivers onto! It’s great having my email / site passwords / personal details with me, but if I can’t access them on the nearest PC they might as well not be there.

Enter the Fingergear USB flash drive. This (admittedly rather industrial looking) device uses fingerprint recognition which is cool in itself, but handles the authentication internally on the device which is even cooler. At last – someone finally got it right!

You register one or more of your fingerprints with the device when you purchase it. When you insert it, you have to authenticate the device before it becomes available to Windows. The important thing is that the flash drive has an embedded processor that can take care of the fingerprint recognition so you don’t have to carry drivers or windows-only applications around in order to use the security features.