The title of this post is a little misleading. USB 3.0 has been out for a while, there just haven’t been many peripherals to support it. Several firms finally released USB 3.0 products today, and though they are certainly cool, certainly fast, I certainly won’t be buying any of them.

Why? That’s my question, actually. Why would I? There is precious little I need to drop onto a thumbdrive these days. Even the raid arrays that launched today are fairly unappealing. My main storage device is attached to my router, and I do nearly all of my backups over the air, which USB 3.0 isn’t going to improve. Documents? Pictures? I have Google, Flickr, Facebook, insert-cloud-storage-of-choice. The days of carrying around the few things I really need on a thumbdrive are long gone, replaced by the convenience and security of offsite backups in duplicate or triplicate.

Don’t get me wrong, USB 3.0 will be around and become increasingly prevalent over the next several years, but my guess is the general public will hardly notice. The one thing consumers understand about the new transfer technology is price, and it’s a price that’s hard to justify when it only gives you faster transfer rates on hardware connected devices.

Kingston’s new 16GB thumbdrive is $89. The 64GB, a whopping $270. A USB 2.0 64GB stick can be had for half that price, and when the holidays roll around, likely a fifth. I can think of precious few consumer applications that would require the 60Mbps write speed that USB 3.0 will provide. So few, in fact, that I couldn’t even name one.

If it weren’t 2010, this would sound like something out of a science fiction movie. “You’re basically talking about an entire jukebox on a flash memory chip the size of your pinkie fingernail.” That’s what SanDisk vice president Eric Bone had to say about his company’s newest microSDHC capacity: 32GB. That’s 7,000 songs. Ten hours of uncompressed HD video. That’s pretty damn incredible.

This is great news for people with a microSD slot on their favorite device. The new capacity was achieved by stacking 8 memory units of 4GB a piece on top of one another, all in a package that’s less than 1mm thick. For a more detailed explanation on what the microengineering process involves, head over to Gizmodo.

The new card will run you a cool $200. That’s a lot of money to spend on something smaller than a dime, so you better be careful with it. Word to the wise – don’t leave it in the open if you have an animal of any kind. I puppysat for a friend this weekend and that little guy ate everything. Watching a puppy drag around a boot that’s twice his size is funny. Digging through the puppy’s poop to find your new SD card is not.