The Sony Micro Vault Tiny packs up to 2GB of storage into a thumbnail-size USB flash drive. (It's half the size of the picture at right, around an inch long). I tested the 1GB, translucent-blue model. It comes with a neat little carrying pouch, which you'll need: Losing this miniscule device would be tragic (and all too easy).

The Micro Vault comes with Virtual Expander software installed: It crunches the files you copy to the flash drive, freeing storage room and giving you virtually three times more space, according to Sony. You can enable Virtual Expander to compress files automatically and decompress them when you copy them to another drive. When I loaded files on the Tiny, Virtual Expander compressed a 140KB Word document down to 14KB and a 50KB Excel spreadsheet to 10KB. but it hardly touched images or executable files; it might knock off a few kilobytes, but not much more. And of course, you still have up to 2GB to play with.

Sony sells the 1GB version for $ 64.99 on their Web site; the 2GB version is $109.99. (It also comes in smaller sizes.)

Thanks to intern Errol Pierre-Louis for this review!