B2B tech company Gemalto has launched their first consumer focused product today aimed at giving users a whole bunch or storage they never had before.

The YuuWaa – which stands for Your Unlimited Way Anytime Anywhere plus an extra U – is a cloud/flash drive storage system combo which offers a total of either 12GB, 22GB or 48GB of space depending on which package you go for.

The base system is the YuuWaa Go (pictured) which costs you £19.99. You get a 4GB stick which contains some plug and play software that takes you to their cloud online storage facility for your extra 8GB. You drag and drop files from your PC and from the flash drive, and back and forth in straight forward fashion. You can even store contacts on the web service, so you can drag files you want to send on from there too.

You get the cloud storage for free for the first half a year but then it works out as £1.79 per month after that – cheaper if you buy in bulk of course.

The next step up is the YuuWaa Plus which offers you an 8GB flash drive and 16GB online for £29.99 and £3.59 per month beyond. And the top end product, as yet unavailable, is the YuuWaa Pro with a 16GB stick and 32GB upstairs.

The system is, of course, password protected and you can access the cloud area without the flash drive which does make one wonder, “Why bother with the USB stick at all?”

Considering that, the service really isn’t offering anything new and, as far as I’m concerned, if you offered me 1,000,000TB more storage I’d fill it with some old rubbish and just be less selective about what data I keep. But, if I have to pay for the privilege, I’m going to start getting ruthless rather than fork out for the rental – even though it is perfectly cheap.

When I first heard of the YuuWaa, I was hoping the stick would have some sort of 3G connectivity for a unique cloud storage solution, but hopefully that is soon to come. Gemalto’s main business is in providing security chips for your bank cards, Oyster cards, SIM cards and just about anything else with one of those little golden honeycomb squares.

So, I’m hoping that the YuuWaa is just a first toe in the water for them. Surely they have to be thinking of an altogether more integrated solution in years to come – a flash drive/dongle/storage/payment/id/system? Imagine losing that gadget.

YuuWaa