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October 31, 2009

Five technologies that will change the face of IT

USB 3.0, 3DTV and other technologies

Glenn Fleishman

We look at five technologies that look set to become part of every day lives very soon, to find out how they'll change our lives.

3D is just one of a number of technologies that a few years ago may have seemed like it would only become part of our every day life in the distant future. However, that's rapidly changing and now it looks as though 3D could be available to all copnsumers in the near future.

Speed and content (much of it video) will be paired consistantly across mobile, laptop, desktop, and home-entertainment systems. New ways of using video -including adding 3D depth or artificial visual overlays - will require more speed, storage, and computational power.

So we've rounded up the five technologies that could be part of every day life very soon, in a bid to discover just if and how they'll make our lives better.

USB 3.0

Before you leave work, you need to back up your computer. You push a button, and five minutes later, while you're still packing up, your system has dumped 150GB of data onto an encrypted 512GB superfast solid-state drive, which you eject to take with you for offsite backup.

On your way home, you stop at a movie kiosk outside a fast-food restaurant and buy a feature-length 3D video download on sale. You plug in your drive, the kiosk reads your credentials, and while you watch a 90 second preview of coming attractions, the 30GB video transfers onto your SSD. You pull out the drive and head home.

USB may be one of the least-sexy technologies built into present-day computers and mobile devices, but speed it up tenfold, and it begins to sizzle. Cut most of the other cables to your computer, and the standard ignites. Bring in the potential of uncompressed video transfer, and you have a raging fire.

Any task that involves transferring data between your PC and a peripheral device -scanning, printing, or transferring files, among others - will be far faster with USB 3.0.

In many cases, the transfer will be complete before you realise it has started.

The 3.0 revision of USB, dubbed SuperSpeed by the folks who control testing and licensing at the USB Implementors Forum (USB-IF), is on track to deliver more than 3.2 gigabits per second (gbps) of actual throughput.

That transfer rate will make USB 3.0 five to ten times faster than other standard desktop peripheral standards, except some flavors of DisplayPort and the increasingly out-of-favor eSATA.

In addition, USB 3.0 can shoot full-speed data in both directions at the same time, an upgrade from 2.0's 'half duplex' (one direction at a time) rates. USB 3.0 jacks will accept 1.0 and 2.0 plug ends for backward compatibility, but 3.0 cables will work only with 3.0 jacks.

NEXT PAGE: More on USB 3.0

USB 3.0, 3DTV and other technologies could change the way we live
More on USB 3.0
Video streaming over Wi-Fi
Where 802.11ad comes in
3D TV
More on 3D TV
'Augmented Reality' in mobile devices
More on augmented reality
HTML5

Continued...
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Comments

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Comments received

jimmy said on Friday, 13 November 2009

one technology that hasent progreesed far enough in my opinion is BLUETOOTH. Firtsly the speed is just to slow and secondly i dont think it gets used enough in products for example Digital Cameras, mp3 players ?

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