Toshiba's wireless USB can do all sorts





A YEAR AGO at Moscone West, we witnessed a ton of demonstrations of Wireless USB standard, and most of them ended up with the connection breaking up after you move the Wireless USB client more than half a meter away.



At this year's IDF, there has been quite a lot of shipping products, not prototypes. We have seen products from Belkin, D-Link, notebooks from Dell, Toshiba, Fujitsu and Lenovo, but the interesting part was Tosh's notebook with the marking Portege R400. This is a tablet PC sporting the UltraWideBand controller with a bandwidth of 1Gbps, not 480Mbps. In this mode, which is yet to become certified, Portege can even stream video files, which was demonstrated to us by a PR rep from WiQuest.



Long story short: taking the video from Tosh hard drive and streaming it to Lenovo's. Looks cool, works even better.

In a very impressive demo, Lenovo's ThinkPad was streaming 720p video (from the worldly known Microsofts WMV-HD trailer page) from Toshiba lappy through D-Link's UltraWideBand (or Wireless USB) hub. The signal wasn't exactly stable once the laptop moved more than half a meter, but UWB is primarily designed for connecting USB keyboards, mouses, sticks, printers and other desktop-related peripherals. Seeing the bandwidth expand from 480Mbps to 1Gbps in some scenarios only makes us wonder why it took so long for this standard to become a reality. According to several spinners, you can expect that as of CES 2008, most notebooks will carry UWB transceivers. Not the cheapest ones, but high-end and mainstream models should carry us into the world of Wireless USB. If the standard works, of course. µ