Lexar Jumps for Google

Lexar has announced its JumpDrive USB flash drives will ship with pre-loaded Google applications like Picasa, Google Toolbar, and Google Desktop Search.

Lexar has announced that, beginning in January 2006, its portable JumpDrive USB flash drives will ship with Google applications pre-loaded, including Google Desktop, Google Toolbar, and photo organizer Picasa.

When customers plug in a Google-loaded JumpDrive, they’ll be promoted to install the free Google applications. If the user accepts the installation, the Google apps will automatically be installed and then removed from the USB drive.

Google’s applications are available for Windows only; presumably Mac and Linux users must manually format or otherwise remove the Google files from the JumpDrives to access the units’ full storage capacity. A few of Lexar’s JumpDrive offerings are also branded as Windows-only.

Steffen Hellmold, vice president of USB flash drives at Lexar, said: “While these popular applications have traditionally been available on the web directly from Google and other Web affiliates, offering them on a Lexar JumpDrive provides a new channel to reach customers. Taking Web-based applications from Google and making them available on the Lexar JumpDrive line is appealing to retailers and is very valuable to consumers worldwide.”

“We’re excited to make it possible for people to easily search the documents, photos, music and video they store on their Lexar JumpDrives and computer hard drives as well as to find information on the Internet,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President, Search Products & User Experience.

All told, the Lexar-Google arrangement seems to complicate the proposition of using a USB flash drive. No one buys a Flash drive to obtain software preloaded on it, especially software easily available for free on the Internet. By introducing software which Windows users must click through to dismiss (and which Linux and Mac users must explicitly delete from the Flash drive), the bundling deal seems to make using a JumpDrive more of a hassle, rather than a valuable add-on.

Hey: maybe what Lexar needs to do is put a small LCD display on its JumpDrives, and display text ads downloaded from Google while the unit is in use and powered up! If the ads significantly reduced the retail price of the JumpDrives