Now we only have to wait a year for devices to start actually using it.

But yes, you heard right.  “SuperSpeed” USB (hopefully to always just be known as USB 3.0 as I am not going to be asking people if they have a “SuperSpeed” port) had its specs finalized.  So now we can get a move on replacing that darned old USB 2 standard.

Okay, so on a more serious note, USB 3 seems to not entirely use the same cable.  Somehow the port is meant to be backward compatible so that USB 2 and 1 devices can plug in, but USB 3 devices will be physically different.  And the cables themselves will be more like ethernet cables than USB cables with a lot more wires inside.  Though rumor has it that an optical system in USB 3 may even be in the works.  Goodness knows how this is all going to work out.  It sounds rather like a mess to me.  The more complex a system is, the more places for things to go wrong.

But on the plus side, compared to USB 2’s 480 Mbits/s speed, USB 3 will have 5.0Gbits/s, which is a bit over 10x faster.  This is handy, as disk drives keep getting larger and larger.  Also, while USB 2 and 1 have used a single direction (unidirectional) data flow, USB 3 will have full duplex flows.  That’ll be nice. Plus this time around power management and rest/sleep states will be a part of the spec from the beginning, so we’ll be getting better energy savings.  Green is always good.

Now comes the hard part: waiting.  The spec may be finalized, but the production doesn’t seem to have been jumped on by pre-spec hopefuls, so literally, the production only now begins.  R&D using the new spec is just starting.  First the electronics and chips to put into USB 3 device controllers and in the USB 3 devices themselves have to be developed.  For that matter, the cables too.  And then the crap that actually uses these like motherboards, add-on cards, joysticks, external disk drives, web cams, et cetera all have to be worked on.  It’ll likely be 2010 before USB 3 devices really come to market in earnest.  That’s over a year, and a long time to live with USB 2 when you know that something better is just around the corner.