Expected to be approved this summer and incorporated in products as early as the end of this year, the new USB On-the-Go spec may "essentially eliminate the role of the PC as a go-between," allowing manufacturers to create gadgets/devices that can connect to each other without a PC; it will allow devices such as digital cameras, cell phones and handhelds to be hosts or slaves.
Comments
there goes steve job's dream of a digital hub.... all your usb are belong to us
FireWire already provides away for devices to communicate in a peer-to-peer setup. I'm not against USB or anything but this just seems like another thing that USB is being shoehorned into doing that it was not designed to do.
- Mono76
So... you mean like fFireWire already does?
Intel needs to give up and let USB do what it is for (and there are many many things that it does great)... and adopt IEEE 1394. ouch!
Not for years, at least. USB was never designed to be peer to peer.
The funny thing is Intel is already a big participant in FireWire developemnt. They are currenty working towards wireless FireWire. Which if I understand correctly is an amalgamation of 802.11 and FireWire.
I think Intel likes to hedge its bets across the board. It seems like if they focused on a couple of cool technologies instead of fence sitting and waiting for one or the other to take off, they could make some cool things happen.
- Mono76
Intel wants to be the Microsoft of small devices, as seen by their insistence on trying to come up with USB 2.0 and other ways of eating into a market that should by all technical means belong to FireWire.
I often hear complaints against FireWire by the open source crowds, trying to say it must be better because there's no port licensing fee like FireWire (ooh, 25 cents! wow that hurts the price of a $500 device :P) What they don't seem to understand is that Intel makes the friggin USB chips! Of course they're not going to charge a port fee, because you're already paying for the controllers!
Jeez, try to do some research on these things, eh?
Intel does make USB chips - but so does a lot of other companies both big and small. While it's true it doesn't make sense for them to charge a licensing fee to themselves, it would certainly make sense to do so to everyone else who makes USB controller... except for one fact which you've missed in your 'exhaustive' research: Intel didn't invent USB on its own. It was designed by a consortium of companies.
And you might want to take a lesson in economy of scale. 25 cents seems like change to us - but multiply it by a million devices and suddenly you're talking a quarter of a million dollars you have to pay out in an industry where a difference of a cent can mean the loss of a sale. That 25 cents at the chip level gets ballooned out to a significant cost by the time you get to a full device. Take at look at the relative cost of external ATA drive cases for a perfect example: the Firewire ones typically cost $30 to $75 more than the equivalent USB version.
And when USB 2.0 gets into full swing later this year, you'll see the same basic prices, but with Firewire speeds. That's going to make Firewire all the harder to sell.
There's a reason that almost every new computer - Mac and PC - comes with USB 1.1 and why so very few have Firewire.
That being said - I do agree that USB-To-Go is probably not the wisest idea. Not because it's bad technology (any technology which works is good technology), but because I'm not sure there's really any *need* for this technology. Still, it doesn't cost anything to explore it.
There's a reason that almost every new computer - Mac and PC - comes with USB 1.1 and
why so very few have Firewire.
Every iMac now sold by Apple has 2 Firewire ports built in. (That's the same as the number of USB ports.) So did all of the last revs, with the exception of the $799 model.
Take at look at the relative cost of external ATA drive cases for a perfect example: the
Firewire ones typically cost $30 to $75 more than the equivalent USB version.
Are you suggesting that the $0.25 fee is responsible for the price difference?
I'm waiting for the answer to that last question myself.
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You could hook up devices, but beyond merely shuffling data back and forth you cant DO too much without a computer device (even a PDA).
Oh well, more interconnectivity is always a good thing.