Think flash memory is nothing more than a boring commodity item these days? A company called Tomato Flash is aiming to breathe a little life back into the market by launching a range of interesting and innovative memory cards. Tomato Flash is actually owned by LiteOn Group who through their subsidiary Dynacard actually manufacture millions of memory cards under OEM for various other vendors. So Tomato Flash is in effect the ”house brand„ being extablished to compete with their OEM partners.

Aside from the usual range of high capacity/high speed SD Cards and Compact Flash cards (they come in all sizes up to 8GB) Tomato also manufacture other variations such as miniSD and microSD, a flavor of memory card that are increasingly found inside mobile phones.
Tomato, however, takes things a step further by adding a host of adaptors and other innovative features to the product lineup, after all, who wants to buy a million different types of memory card to cover all your electronic gadgetry?

One of my favourites from the launch was the Combo SD card. A standard 150x, 2GB SD Card by day, at night this card doubles as a USB drive. Simply click the end cap off the back of the SD Card and there’s your USB connector ready to be plugged into any PC without the aid of a card reader. What’s more this one is also waterproof. Handy.

Also handy are the miniSD or microSD Tomato Flash cards. With these you also get a convenient SD Card adaptor or if you prefer, a MemoryStick Pro Duo adaptor?

In addition to all the nifty memory cards Tomato also do a range of USB flash drives. The 1GB T1 USB Flash Drive they demonstrated isn’t up to Windows Vista ReadyBoost standards but ones that are, aren’t far away apparently.

The product lineup looks good and although pricing isn’t finalised yet they promise things will be ”competitive„. One thing’s for sure, demand for flash memory cards, especially high capacity models, is only going to increase.