Ever on the lookout for new gadgets, and curious to see what they will think of next, I came across an interesting combination of toy and tech. Who would have thought those ubiquitous little plastic building bricks of the 20th century would end up housing 21st century technology. And look so cute or weird doing so, depending on your perspective.

I particularly liked the thumbdrive or USB flash drive put inside a little toy brick.

It strikes me as a perfect blend, offering practical convenience of portable storage, wrapped up in silly fun that the child in me gets a kick out of. It certainly is a different look for a thumbdrive with 4 Gigabytes of flash memory, and with the bonus of that “satisfying snap they give when piecing them together.”

Looking even more toy-like, there’s an MP3 player made out of these little bricks. Not the most sophisticated player out there certainly, but it still has 2GB of internal memory, a mini-USB connector, 3.5mm headphone jack outputs, comes with earbuds, has a built-in rechargeable battery for up to 8 hours playback, supports MP3 and WMA files, and has an LCD status screen, and measures just 1.6 x 0.6 x 2.2 inches. Not bad for something that looks like it came out of a Kinder Surprise Egg.