Yet another Universal USB
USB stands for Universal Serial Bus, but if you have cameras, tablets and sat-navs, each with not quite interchangeable USB leads, you will know that USB isn't quite the single universal standard that it should be.
Currently there are at least six types of plug you can find on the end of a USB lead. The original chunky lead, called Type A, matches the USB sockets on your computer, but you will also have discovered that there is a different type of USB plug, the USB Type B plug, which is squarer and used on the end of the lead that plugs into many printers, scanners and external disk drives. These days we use USB 2.0 which runs at a higher speed than the original USB.
Portable equipment tends to use a much smaller and much more fiddly format, known as USB Mini A and Mini B, whilst tablets and slimline equipment have begun opting for an even slimmer version, the USB Micro A and Micro B variations. To further complicate matters, there are also some hybrid plugs in use dubbed mini-AB and micro-AB. These plugs and the corresponding sockets are so small that it becomes increasingly difficult to work out which USB lead goes with which device, and which way round the lead needs to go when you plug it in.
Despite these issues with USB, it is still a vast improvement over the situation PC owners experienced prior to USB, when every scanner, printer, keyboard and mouse had its own unique cable and often needed a special card to be plugged into the PC to provide the correct socket. Many of those cables were fat inflexible things, and very pricey if you needed to replace one. USB has completely changed the way we connect things to computers, but it could be simplified further.
Addressing these problems, the industry is now rolling out a whole new USB standard, which will be dubbed USB 3.0 and the connectors will be dubbed Type C. The Type C plug and socket will be similar in size to the current Micro connectors, but unlike previous designs, the Type C will be symmetrical, so you can plug it in either way round and should be easier to insert.
Type C will also be much faster, being able to transfer data at up to 5GB per second. That's more than ten times faster than the current USB 2.0, and around 400 times faster than the original USB specifications, making it even more suitable for connecting devices such as external disk drives where speed is critical, and for transferring photos and videos from the memory cards inside cameras.
USB cables are also used to deliver power to low-power peripherals but larger devices typically need their own external power supply. That too could change with the advent of USB3. USB1 delivered just 0.75W of power, USB2 upped this to a maximum of 4.5W, whilst USB3 has options to push this all the way to 100W which would be more than enough to power most devices.
USB3 and the Type C connector is already here. You can buy machines off the shelf in places like PC World, made by manufacturers such as HP, which now have these included as standard. Whilst you will still need USB2 cables with all the different connectors for quite a few years yet, next time you but a new PC or laptop, its probably worth making sure it comes with at least one USB3 port.
27th August 2014
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.