Jabba the Hutt and Slave Leia USB Flash Drives (Mimobot Series 8)

As I mentioned a few days ago, Mimoco has finally released a Jabba the Hutt Mimobot (USB flash drive). Of course Slave Leia is also a welcome addition, but not having a Jabba seemed wrong, especially since they called the last series the “Jabba’s Palace Series” (more on those in a later entry). Mimoco has been producing flash drives in the shape of Star Wars characters for several years now — I bought the Series 3 version of C-3Po (a nice golden chrome version) back in 2009 — but I’ve always thought that they were very expensive. Back when I got my C-3PO, I paid $35 for 2GB and as I recall that was a pretty good deal compared to the MSRP. However, the price of flash memory has come down quite a bit since then (and perhaps Mimoco has rethought its pricing strategy as well), making these much more reasonable at $19.99 for 8GB, which is the smallest available size. You can get up to 64GB for $69.99. It’s probably still more expensive than most generic looking US flash drives, but these are now cheap enough that I can see someone actually wanting to collect them rather than just getting one or two of their favorite characters.

Jabba’s design is a little unusual for a Mimobot in that his head is higher up, so you end up removing his entire head when you take the cap off. They did get some subtle design details like his arm tattoo right, and he’s even holding a froggy snack. 😀 Each Mimobot also has an LED in the back that flashes when the drive is being accessed. Jabba’s light is green, as might be expected.

Leia looks a bit more conventional (for a Mimobot). You remove the top of her head when removing the cap. Her LED is a sort of pinkish-purple color.

One thing I do really like about the Mimobots is that you get some extras on the drive itself when you buy one. One of my favorites are the icons/avatars. You get icons that can be used for either Mac or PC computers, including one of the actual flash drive itself, one of a “hard drive” that has been changed to match the character’s design (check out the Jabba one below!) and a one of a cartoony version of the character, plus a few extra. With series 8, the extras include Salacious Crumb, the Rancor and Jabba’s hooka pipe, and even a Leia strangling Jabba. These go a long way toward making any extra expense for the drives seem worth it. (You get the extras for all of the Series 8 characters no matter which one you buy, so you’ll also get the Biker Scout, Jedi Luke, and Ackbar versions, but I’m only concentrating on Jabba and Leia here.) These scale up very nicely on OS X without any loss of detail, so you can make them a lot bigger than what you see below.

However, I should mention one issue with these icons. The normal way of changing an icon in Mac OS X is to “Get Info” (command-I) on the file with the icon you want to change, copy the icon, then paste it into the “Get Info” screen for the file whose icon you want to change. This won’t work with these icons, however. When you “Get Info” on them, the icon shown is just the generic “icon” icon. Previous Mimobot series have been okay in this respect, so it looks like someone at Mimoco just messed up. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to fix if you use the free software called icns2icon. Just drag the icons into the app and it will make it so you can copy and paste them as normal.

You also get some wallpaper files in a multitude of sizes, from very small (smartphone screen) to very large (HD computer screen). The design varies a bit depending on the resolution, but this should give you an idea. They’re mostly shots from the actual Star Wars movies with the Mimobot taking the place of the actual character on screen. Kind of cute.

You’re also supposed to get access to Mimobot Soundbytes, which is a program that is supposed to play sounds from the character when you insert the drive into your computer. However, I found that the software didn’t work on my Macs (I tried a machine running OS X 10.6 and OS X 10.7 and neither worked). Doing a little poking around online leads me to believe that the software may only be compatible with even older versions of Mac OS X. There’s no mention of this that I could find on the packaging or in the readme file, so this is a bit disappointing. I would probably get sick of the sounds pretty quickly and disable them, but they should at least work.

Now that Mimobots are a bit more affordable, I’m hoping that they’ll release some more Jabba’s Palace characters, like the Gamorrean Guard or Oola, which you can see in the video in this post.