A gift from Korea

It's not big and it's not clever, but we couldn't help snickering over the web site from Korean manufacturer Mintpass, whose Mintpad mobile internet device plus associated accessories and services the company promises will "provide every customer with amazements and relentless fun". And so it proves.

One of Mintpass's accessories is the Mint Hard (do you begin to see where this is going?). Apparently an ice cream bar is called a 'Hard' in Korea, as is a hard disk drive — indeed, according to Mintpass, "Koreans would ask each other, 'how big is your hard?' when asking for the PC's HDD capacity". Any visiting Koreans employing such terminology over here may not always receive an answer in gigabytes...

So, what could be more natural than to combine the two meanings, and produce a hard disk drive that looks like an ice cream bar? Enter the Mint Hard — below we see the Mint Hard Chocolate model:

It's actually quite neat: a 1.8in. hard drive in the 'ice cream' portion and a USB flash drive for the 'stick' portion. The Chocolate model has a 120GB HDD and an 8GB USB stick, while the Strawberry ("Wow, how fruity!") is 80GB/4GB and the Vanilla ("Wow, how creamy!") is 60GB/2GB.

Mintpass reassures users who may be taken in by the product's verisimilitude that "Mint Hard has been engineered with a high-density plastic with high gloss coating so that even if a user mistakenly takes a bite, a user need not worry about leaving a teeth mark".

Well, you wouldn't want to leave teeth marks in your Mint Hard, would you?

I'd better stop now, but not before drawing attention to another Mintpass product — the Mint Horn. Check it out.