I had an older Compaq laptop circa 2004 that had USB 1.0 and I remember trying to add over 100 songs to my iPod through iTunes. It would takeforever. I would rather wait to get home from wherever I was to transfer songs because my PC at home had USB 2.0 and the difference in speed was incredible. Now I'm sometimes transferring 10+ gigs of information from a hard drive to an external hard drive, external to a flash drive, etc. Even though USB 2.0 is fast, I still have to wait several minutes for the transfer to complete. I know, several minutes... We are so spoiled. USB 3.0 is said to be 10 times faster than 2.0 while using a third of the power and it's backward compatible. A new major feature is the SuperSpeed bus, which provides a fourth transfer mode at 4.8 Gbit/s. The raw throughput is 4 Gbit/s, and the specification considers it reasonable to achieve 3.2 Gbit/s (0.4 GByte/s or 400 MByte/s) or more after protocol overhead [1]. If you were lucky enough to go to this year's CES you probably heard about hard drives, motherboards, adapter cards, laptops and devices that are now using 3.0 technology. Expect to see a lot more about on USB 3.0 as more and more devices that support it hit the market this year.

[1] Wikipedia

(posted by Carlos Arellano)

At CES this week, the largest microchip manufacturer in the world, Intel, announced that they have decided to get in on the app frenzy. They've opened a new app store geared towards netbook computers called Atom. That's right. You know those little pieces of software called applications? Well they're no longer just for your cell phone. Can you imagine the possibilities of running applications on a computer?... Oh wait... that's what you're doing right now...



Anyway, what's really exciting is the amount of companies in other parts of the electronics industry that are also interested in apps. Samsung announced this week that they would be opening their own app store for HDTVs, Blu-Ray players, as well as cell phones. Surprisingly enough, Ford Motor Company even announced some apps that would be available in its vehicles late this year.

I think this is fantastic news and a great step forward for technology in general. As modern tech grows exponentially, the microchips that are used in even the simplest of computers are performing way under their potential. Think about the possibilities of television applications for example. They could interact with certain commercials, tv shows and movies. They could learn what kinds of content you like and tailor a playlist for you.  Or the ability to upgrade firmware to increase the performance of your current hardware. The opportunities are endless for clever companies. Look at all the applications on the iPhone that make you say, "hmm, I never would have thought to use it for that."

The future is bright for technology! I can't wait to see where this leads.