flash

Whether you use them in your everyday work flow, or dust them off on occasion, flash drives are perhaps one of the handiest, most underrated gadgets out there. Despite the cloud storage trend, many of us still rely on these doodads when we need to transfer data in a pinch.

And thanks to the InterWebs, there's a seemingly endless variety of unique flash drives to match your equally special personality.

But, what's better than forking over $20 to $30 on a low-capacity, overpriced flash drive? Making your own on the cheap. After sifting through the Web for DIYs, … Read more

COLOGNE, Germany -- There's room for a higher-end flash card format that's faster and more capacious than SD Card, and for years, CompactFlash has occupied that market niche.

But CompactFlash is running out of steam, and finding a successor to CompactFlash just got a lot messier courtesy of a new standard that arrived this week at the Photokina trade show here.

Last year, Nikon and Sony carried the XQD format to market as the would-be CompactFlash successor, with Nikon's flagship D4 camera accepting the cards and Sony making the cards. But Canon and professional camera maker Phase … Read more

If you'd like to download and save videos from YouTube but don't care for some of the more versatile (read: "complex") video tools out there, 1-Click YouTube Downloader might be what you're looking for. As the name suggests, it can download videos with a single click, more or less; certainly with less effort than any similar tool we've tried. While it's a bit thin on options, that's in keeping with its keep-it-simple mission statement; nevertheless, it does cover the basics. Naturally, 1-Click YouTube Downloader is freeware: After all, YouTube is free, too!… Read more

GetFLV from SuperLogix is a shareware Flash video application that's free to try for 14 days. It's a full-featured tool that can create, convert, and download Flash videos, but unlike freeware tools that only work with a few sites or file types (or just with YouTube) GetFLV can download pretty much any video that can be downloaded, and from any video hosting site, too. It also quickly and easily converts videos to play on your iPhone or other device, and it packs some extras like an Audio Ripper and an FLV Fixer than can repair damaged or corrupted … Read more

Flv Crunch is one of many free tools available for converting various video and audio files to multiple formats. The application has a pretty standard user interface, giving you access to the basic conversion operations without any customization options, but you won't really miss them, as Flv Crunch does a very good job in a short time frame.

If you are a novice user, you may want to access the built-in Help file, but intermediate and advanced level users will intuitively know where to click and what action to take in order to improve the video conversion. What we … Read more

Let's see if we can get through one day -- heck, one morning -- without the product selling out, shall we?

While supplies last, Best Buy has the SanDisk Cruzer 16GB USB flash drive for $7.99 shipped, plus sales tax in most states.

Update: This appears to have sold out online, and is now available in-store only. So much for lasting the morning.

Whoops, sorry, sold out. Nah, I'm kidding -- as of this writing, it's still in stock. But just in case, I've queued up three bonus deals for you below. Because that's … Read more

We love YouTube downloaders because they make it so easy to grab and save video from YouTube's inexhaustible, ever-expanding supply. Whatever you like, if it's on video, it's probably on YouTube in one form or another. HOW's Free YouTube Downloader is one of the easiest tools for that job we've found. It not only downloads videos from YouTube but also converts them and files from your hard drive into formats you can play on your iPad, iPhone, and similar devices. It offers several quality levels, including HD quality, and plays your converted file when the … Read more

Quick housekeeping note: The deals I share are in stock and available at the time I post them. Unfortunately, the especially awesome ones tend to sell out quickly, sometimes very soon after my post goes live.

Many a frustrated reader will call the company (or one of its stores, if applicable) in hopes of getting that price, only to be told there's "no such deal and there never was," or, "We don't know where CNET got that information."

Most of the deals I find are available exclusively online, though there are exceptions (like the … Read more

Suppose you're taking a long trip and want to stock your smartphone or tablet with a bunch of movies.

Just one problem: there's no room at the inn. A Kindle Fire, for example, famously has only 8GB of storage, with no option for expansion. Same goes for any iDevice you own: once it's full, it's full.

Maxell's AirStash offers storage salvation. It's a USB flash drive that also happens to be wireless, meaning it can store files and stream media to a variety of mobile devices. It's an effective solution, though not an … Read more