Away from glitz and glamor of the big company booths, the seeds that will blossom into the cool gadgets of the next few years are being planted. The next iteration of the ubiquitous USB standard, used to hook up devices including keyboards, cameras, disk drives and even small cannons to a computer, is here.
An engineering demo of USB 3.0 — officially dubbed SuperSpeed USB — tucked away in a distant corner of the Las Vegas Convention Center is the herald of a much zippier future. The SuperSpeed standard was released to the electronics industry only two months ago, and the first products are expected to appear this year, with broad adoption in 2010, and it will turbo charge a lot of devices. With SuperSpeed, you should be able download 8 gigabytes of pictures from a camera in just 8 seconds, or copy 16 gigabytes to a flash drive in 40 seconds. What’s interesting is not just the boost this will give to existing devices, but that there are guaranteed to be unexpected surprises as whole new applications that no one thought of before become possible thanks to the new technology. (Oh, and don’t worry, you won’t have to throw away your current USB devices, the new standard is backward compatible.)
