The new technology offers data transfer speeds between computers and mobile devices of roughly 100 megabytes per second, or 800 megabits per second (Mbps). While that is not much compared to the nearly 5 gigabits per second available between PCs with USB 3.0, it is nearly double the 480 Mbps available for mobile devices with USB 2.0.

Data transfer isn’t the only area of improvement, either. In most of our gadgets these days, USB does double duty: data transfer and charging. In addition to significantly faster data transfer, the newer standard also improves the power transfer speeds, which means faster charging for tablets and smartphones with the technology.

[Source: PC World]

It’s the second headset I’ve bought in less than a week. This one, in fact, is a return-and-replacement for the one I bought a few days earlier. That one – a Plantronics Audio 510 USB - appeared to be faulty as every time I used it with Skype, the mute button would turn on by itself. Every time. Useless for my needs.

I’ve always bought Plantronics headsets until now. I have a Plantronics DSP 400 USB headset. It worked great right up until I stepped on the volume controller a few weeks ago. That resulted in sound out of only one headphone. Then I stepped on it again last week. Kaput – no sound at all.

So I’m happy with the Logitech product. Great sound quality with Skype, both for making calls and recording. And no weird self-muting.

While glancing through the Logitech website support pages – as one tends to do when buying a new product – I came across a useful bit of information about improving
the quality of your audio playback on a Windows PC.

A registry hack and worth doing. Very useful to know.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

In Windows, USB supports are built in the Windows Driver Model Specification, or WDM, to grant compatibility and support to later developments in USB drivers.

For installation of a USB device or computer peripherals, simply plug the cord of said device into the USB port of your host system. Another device known as IEEE 1394 is a similar device, however the latest version of the USB works faster than the IEEE 1394. Though both the USB devices and the IEEE 1394 devices process on same technologies, their connections cannot be used interchangeably. This incompatibility is mainly due to the differences in size of the ports.

The IEEE 1394 port measures approximately 1mm by 5mm while the USB port is 7mm by 1mm.

In addition, the Institute Electrical and Electronics Engineer 1394 or IEEE 1394, or more commonly known as the FireWire, gained popularity over the previous version of the USB because of its faster speed in transferring data. Moreover, it is more commonly used for transferring digital photo and video into the computer. For this reason, the majority of digital cameras and video come with FireWire ports rather than the USB ports.

Generally speaking, USB drives are used to provide an additional backup system for easier storage and retrieval operations. Also, you can widen the capacity of your mother system by adding USB drives.

USB drives may appear in many forms. Two of these are Zip drives and the USB Flash drive (better known as the pen drives).

USB drives may often function like hard drives, only that they are portable and can be carried around anywhere and can be plugged into different computer units.

Flash drives or the pen drives have the same general characteristics. Basic features include light weight, small sizes, and portability. There is a wide variety of brands for USB drives. They almost always perform in the same way, only differing greatly in functionality, price, design, and other add-in features.

This form of USB drive can be compared with other data transfer and storage media. USB drives are now available in both online and offline computer accessories stores, electronic distributors and e-retailers.

USB drives are ideal for end users who are frequently transferring data from one individual computer unit to another, or for storing files which require large memory. Also, USB drives may benefit people who regularly transport documents, information, and digital files like digital pictures and videos.

Oftentimes, USB drives are handier when compared to USB external hard drives and other forms of hard drives. Normally, the operating system does not require the configuration or the rebooting of the system before it recognizes and operates the USB drive. Also, most USB drives do not contain moving parts or separate components that can be damaged by being dropped or crushed.

Moreover, USB drives can hold larger-sized data. Instead of the meager capacity of a 1.44 MB floppy disk, the USB drive can store as much as 2 gigabytes of memory. The most effective drives, however, can have a memory capacity of 8 GB.

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Richard Brown is an author for several web sites, on shopping ideas and product tips topics.

Certified Wireless USB, as it’s being officially called, is being developed by the WiMedia Alliance, who has been selected by the USB Implementers Forum, the 1394 Trade Association and the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) for its Ultrawideband (UWB) technology. Ultrawideband was chosen as the next-gen standard due to its speed and versatility.

Operating at speeds around 480 megabits per second, UWB connections are faster than current USB 2.0 technologies, and with a range of up to 10 meters. Transfer rates will diminish as the wireless UWB adapters near their 10 meter limit, but the ability to operate an second external hard drive that’s 30 feet away should make up for it. Said Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates:

This stuff is plumbing. It’s important that it be there, it’s going to be handy for getting rid of cables hanging around your desk.

Ironically the first couple months of wireless USB aren’t going to be entirely wireless.

Before wireless USB capabilities are integrated into products, a series of dongles will have to be used to connect two devices with wireless USB. In the instance of a printer, for example, one dongle would be plugged into the back of the printer, while the other would be plugged into the back of a PC. The two dongles would then be synchronized, either by software or by a button on the dongle, at which point the two devices could communicate wirelessly. But even with a dongle system, Certified Wireless USB means that the criss-cross of cables, and the constant plugging and un-plugging of peripheral devices are things of the past.

As Certified Wireless USB becomes more prevalent use of the connection will become a much more seamless process. Chip manufacturers hope to put UWB chips into expansion cards as early as next year. Wireless USB will also be integrated directly into motherboards further down the road, marking a universal acceptance and compatibility that should allow manufacturers to release more wireless-USB-only solutions. The conversion to total wireless USB dominance may be slow, however, much as the transition between legacy and USB 1.0 was. But even without complete standardization initially wireless USB will streamline the process of connecting peripherals, mp3 players, digital cameras, hard drives to the PC. If only we could say dongle without laughing.

[via cnet]

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*Originally published at TechFreep

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Mike Zazaian is the Editor-in-Chief and Webmaster of TechFreep.com, an online publication dedicated to daily technology and science news. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he majored in Film and Video studies with a sub-concentration in screenwriting. While only a minority of Mike’s formal education encompassed the technology field, he has worked as a web developer, a freelance web designer, and has been a tech enthusiast for the better part of his life.

“We didn’t want to go dark in the market,” explained Ed Brill, the Business Unit Executive for Worldwide Lotus Messaging Sales at IBM, during a chat on Monday. Since they had a slew of features ready to go, and so much attention being paid to the productivity space this week, IBM decided to release the latest version of Lotus Notes/Domino.

We talked about three specific aspects of 7.0.2 that Notes users should appreciate. The first one is the ability to place Notes on a 512MB USB stick or other storage device like an iPod, and take it along on trips. This allows the person to take a personalized Notes environment and plug it into any USB-compatible PC.

Once deployed on that machine, the user has a replica of the usual Notes workplace ready to use. Users can download a utility to create the installation, and place that on the portable storage device.

Although the second notable feature, blogging with Notes/Domino, has been part of Lotus for the past three years, Brill noted how the application IBM acquired to provide this functionality has been updated to meet IBM’s standards.

This takes the form of an out of the box template for Notes, where users can design and create blogs. Entries can be created offline, and when the user next connects to Domino, new and updated entries will be updated to the blog automatically.

The third new feature of mention brings the ability to publish RSS out of Lotus. I asked if this would be more likely used internally within an enterprise or externally, and Brill felt it is mostly meant to be internal. “It’s a great way to be alerted to changes,” Brill said of syndicating content this way.

Additional features like SAP integration and iCalendar compatibility offer improved methods of working with other processes and people in the enterprise.

Plenty of focus on productivity suites and portability has been generated this week with the opening of the Office 2.0 conference, the rebranding of Writely as Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and the efforts of companies like Zoho and ThinkFree to create desktop-less office applications. The portability option for Notes now adds to this mix.

Brill highlighted a number of the features coming out in the latest update on his blog. That and his running battle with a blogger named Rod Boothby over Lotus Notes makes for some interesting reading today.

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I thought it would be really cool if bloggers did the same. I’m more interested in how you manage your workload and the tools you use than I am in Bill Gates. Here’s my crack at it. File yours under the Technorati tag .

I work Web 2.0 style across multiple Macs and PCs. Over the past two years I have shifted most of my work off the desktop and onto the cloud. I run far fewer applications this year than I did last. I keep either Entourage or Outlook running for my corporate mail. I use PowerPoint a lot and ecto or Marsedit for blogging. Beyond these apps, pretty much everything else I run in either Firefox or Camino across multiple tabs. I keep a copy of Firefox on a one gigabyte USB key with my bookmarks and cookies so that I can work from anywhere I get my hands on a computer.

In my browser I usually keep some combination of the following sites open in browser tabs…

Box.net for storage
Backpack for tracking actions/GTD
Gmail for personal/blog mail
Writely for my daybook
Bloglines or Newsgator Online for my feeds
Meebo for IM
Google for searching
Google Bookmarks for bookmarks
Popurls for meme and news tracking (a recent addition)

Our corporate intranet

Outlook Web Access for corporate mail/calendar/addresses (when I am not in my office)

When I am at my computer I use Backpack to track my projects and next actions. I add and subtract things to the list as they come up. I keep Writely open for notes. I start a new file each week. When I am on calls I enter my notes in Writely because I know that I can always find the information I need later because the database is completely searchable from every computer I use.

On an average weekday I get anywhere from 150 – 200 emails. They are split equally between Gmail and my corporate email accounts. I have a Blackberry that receives email from both accounts. I also use my Blackberry to check RSS feeds and to update my lists in Backpack. Writely doesn’t have a mobile version yet so I can’t access my notes on the go. However, they have an email-to-document feature which I use a lot. I write up notes after meetings and email them into Writely. I go over these notes when I conduct my GTD Weekly Review. Other than a thin Moleskine Cahier notebook, which I use in meetings, I don’t use paper.

Over the past two years I have made blogging part of my regular day. You can read how I do this on Debbie Weil’s blog. It’s a critical part of my day. The feedback I get from readers as well as the information I get from RSS feeds keeps me smart about where media and marketing are going. This helps me do my part in helping Edelman stay one step ahead of the curve. My day stretches from 4:30 or 5 a.m. until as late as 8 or 9 p.m. split between the office, at home and in transit.

Information overload is at times a challenge, but I enjoy it. I subscribe to a few hundred RSS feeds and I get all of my news online. I don’t read a newspaper or watch TV. The Web is my window onto the world for both business and personal information and communication.

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Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.

“While these popular applications have traditionally been available on the Web directly from Google and other Web affiliates, offering them on a Lexar JumpDrive provides a new channel to reach customers,” said Steffen Hellmold, vice president of USB flash drives at Lexar.

Customers who use a JumpDrive would plug the device into a USB port on their computer, where they can choose to automatically install Google products. Lexar said it expects the offering to make it easier for users to search documents, photos, music and other data stored on their JumpDrive.

Let’s hope that “choose to automatically install Google products” is clearly labelled. Do you know how many times Adobe has tried to install Yahoo’s toolbar each time I update? Sheesh.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but I would not be surprised if it involved Google buying a whole boatload of branded USB kits to send out to AdWords advertisers.

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

The Mazda Sassou is designed to incorporate USB flash technology and the current Internet revolution into a driving experience.

The USB keys can be used to unlock and start the car while offering other features that will one day reduce keys that only have two or three functions to obsolescence.

The car has an internal hard drive to which drivers can transfer driving directions or music downloaded from the Internet. It’s only a matter of time until we see drive-by spammings.

1. OpenOffice doesn’t appear to be in the distribution. Whatever the reason is, it needs to be overcome. KDE Office and Gnome Office are cool, but not including OpenOffice is a big big big mistake. OpenOffice is one of the key suites to convert people to Linux. Having the choice of 3 office suites, Gnome Office, KDE Office, and Openffice (along with lots of other cool software like GIMP. Mozilla, Evolution, PovRay, etc) can really convert people over.
2. The kernel under /usr/src/linux for RedHat 7.3 doesn’t seem to be configured the way they installed the kernels onto your system. I tried searching on RedHat’s website, but I didn’t anywhere. Isn’t it a little stupid that that don’t supply (or make it easy to find) the configs files they used to compile the kernels? Perhaps I am blind, but it wasn’t obvious to me where their custom config file was. It makes me mad because whenever I try to compile the kernel, I can never get all the features I want without it being too large (even though I try to modularize everything).
3. The kernel installed apparently won’t let you add modules that you create yourself. At least, when I tried to compile the usbide module outside the source tree of the kernel, it was giving some weird error saying it wasn’t allowed to do it. However, on the computer I bought from Emperor Linux (RedHat 7.2), I didn’t have that problem (the kernel was compiled by the company and I was able to compile the usbide module without recompling the kernel).

Even though my usb camera and mouse works in RedHat 7.3, because I couldn’t use the usb hard drive with it (without compiling a new kernel from scratch which I always screw up), I decided to use the usb hard drive and camera with the Linux laptop I got from Emperor Linux.

The USB Optical Mouse

I have 3 USB optical mice (different brands) and they all worked with RedHat 7.3, RedHat 7.2, and my Emperor Linux computer. I don’t know if the default kernel in RedHat 7.2 works with the optical mice because I compiled different kernels (to get my wireless network cards to work right).

NOTE: Whoever likes to use trackball mice compared to optical mice has to be an idiot. The optical usb/ps2 mice are very cheap these days and the balls on the standard mice always get cluttered with junk and wear out. Go out and replace the stupid trackball mice with an optical mouse today.

The USB HP PhotoSmart 318 camera

My HP PhotoSmart 318 camera really rocks. Here is a help page I found.

http://lhd.datapower.com/db/dispproduct.php3?DISP?3101

It rocks because on a price/performance ratio, it was the best camera out there for $179. All the other cameras that could do the same (or even less) were easily two or three times more expensive. I think the market changed and a lot of older models haven’t dropped in price yet. For my needs it was perfect. It had enough resolution, it saved jpg images, and I could get memory expansion if I needed it (8 megs is fine so I will never need to get the expansion).

Bottom line, in RedHat 7.3 and my Emperor Linux computer, just as the article said:

1. Changed the camera to hard drive mode.
2. usb-uhci worked fine (in the article it didn’t).
3. In my /etc/fstab,

      ### for my camera. /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera vfat noauto,sync,nosuid,user,unhide 0 0 

4. mkdir -p /mnt/camera
5. mount /mnt/camera

And then the images where at “/mnt/camera/dcim/100hp318/”. I didn’t test deleting the images. I will just delete them when I use the camera, but I copied them over just fine. I am able to get about 14 images without additional memory expansion.

I think ultimately most people will be using digital cameras within 5 years and the standard camera industry will be dead except for photographers and the little cameras you buy for one-time events. Digital cameras will be able to contain so much memory in the next few years, hopefully within 5 years you can store hundreds of images on a simple small camera. Why would you want a film camera?

BUSLink 40G USB external hard drive

My usb external hard drive was a pain in the butt. It was easy once I found this webpage, http://bravin.home.cern.ch/bravin/usbide/usbide.html. It was a pain because I kept on trying and trying to figure what to do to get it to work.

1. Downloaded usbide-1.2.2-b.tgz
2. tar -zxvf usbide-1.2.2-b.tgz
3. cd usbide
4. make
5. make install

There were a few problems,

1. I had to make a link for /usr/src/linux.
2. The hard drive can only have one partition because it won’t save changes if you try and change the heads/sectors/cylinders.
3. When I stressed tested the hard drive by copying lots of data over, after 1 gig, it froze on me and gave me a weird error. I haven’t had a problem since.
4. For whatever reason, the standard RedHat 7.3 wasn’t configured right to let me compile my own module and add it to the modules under /lib/modules. Personally, I think that is stupid.
5. For whatever reason, I couldn’t find a config file for kernel compiling to get the exact same kernel RedHat has installed on my system. If I had to compile a new kernel, I would want the exact same one with just a few of my changes. Maybe you can do it and their config file exists somewhere, as I didn’t try that hard, but it wasn’t obvious (which is should be). Thus I just used the computer I got the Emperor Linux.

Suggestions for Future

I have a webcam I was interested in trying out. Look at http://webcam-osx.sourceforge.net/cameras.html. My IBM NetCam is not supported on that list, bummer. They are cheap enough. I will just consider buying a new web cam.

Conclusions.

Using USB devices is really cool. I used to hate USB devices, but now that I can have tons of stuff attached to my Linux boxes without them using up all the resources, I like it. I just wish more companies would help create Linux drivers for their products. I would never use a USB hard drive for anything except backups and I wouldn’t rely on USB for stuff that requires a lot of cpu power. Firewire is good for heavy stuff. All the other USB devices (mice, keyboards, printers, webcam, camera, etc) are a good match for USB because they require low overhead.

I copied over 3 gigs of data to my hard drive and I got seek errors. I thought there could have been bad sectors, so I ran mkfs with the “-c” option, and it took all day. Eventually, mkfs bombed, so I am going to wait a little longer before I use the external hard drive with Linux. Most likely, I will check hardware compatibility and go out and buy a new external hard drive (maybe firewire instead of USB).

References

1. http://lhd.datapower.com/db/dispproduct.php3?DISP?3101
2. http://bravin.home.cern.ch/bravin/usbide/usbide.html

Copyright © 4/2002 Mark Nielsen

Mark Nielsen works at AudioBoomerang.com which creates, delivers, and tracks personalized multimedia email, web, and newsletter campaigns. He works as a consultant delivering end products to http://AudioBoomerang.com clients, such as advanced customized statistical reports used for demographic or pyschological profiles for future campaigns. In his spare time, he writes articles relating to Free Software (GPL) or Free Literature (FDL) and is involved with the non-profit learning center http://www.eastmont.net.