Thank goodness for password reminders! It was a good month ago that I extracted the very sleek Pico freedom from the just as complimentary packaging. A small (think skinny lighter) USB stick looked very swanky with its black gloss exterior. Good start.
Whilst I am reaching a point of embarrassment in having to repeat my paranoia about data security, this fact was why I had the Pico freedom, 1GB version. This little USB stick is fully encrypted so if it’s stolen, voila, your data is safe from prying eyes (can I run the joke again about Government personnel being issued these as standard kit?)

With excellent transfer speeds  - 24MB/s Read and 20MB/s Write, it certainly wasn’t lacking in that department.
Having played with it for an evening and thought “Ok, cool enough” and transferred several small but essential databases on to it for trial purposes, I then left it on my desk for a month and got on with my life.

Until tonight when I returned to write the review.
I slotted it back into my USB drive and .. um.. the password is? .. oh.
Such is my paranoia that I got all the way down to my last attempt, using my own password hint and with the red threat on the screen along the lines of
“You have 1 attempt left before being permanently locked out”
or some such, scaring the blazes out of me.
I managed it but as I write, can still feel the little knot of “Crikey, that was close” – all the more worrying as I’d forgotten what I’d stored on it!
Very effective!

Would I buy it?
Two things however would stop me from purchasing this device myself.
Firstly, as smart as it is, it has no facility to carry it and in fact on trying to extract it from my USB drive, I couldn’t get a grip! Sleek exterior – excellent visually and useless practically.
Secondly I take umbrage with the price. The 1GB version I have is ... RRP £51! The 8GB comes in at a whopping £199! [VAT inclusive price]
All the ad words in the World from “the Rolls Royce of..” to “You’re paying for quality” isn’t going to sway me on that shocker! Knock a 3rd off that price however and I’d be the first to step forward and say you’ve got a deal.

My rating is a generous 6/10 – whilst normally I’d only knock a point or two off if the price was inappropriate on this occasion it’s so farfetched I’m smashing 3 points off. They lose a point for the lack of thought in enabling safe carriage with a key fob etc facility.

See www.eclypt.com for more details or to purchase