Let the hive mind of Engadget get that for you.
"We need a digital camera that can be switched on and fire off that first shot fast. It's not a commonly tracked statistic on any review site, and nobody seems to have this information for every camera. We were hoping other readers could inform us as to what small digital cameras can fire off their first pics in under a second (ideally under half a second). It needs to be small, but mostly, just really quick in operation. Thanks!"
You're being completely unrealistic if you believe adoption of a new bus technology can be any where near instantaneous. USB today is ubiquitous; but it took years of development and promotion before it got there - and yes, I'm old enough to remember it! The same can be said of almost every bus and protocol in use today.
The ultimate point of WUSB is a complete wire replacement. Ultimately we hoped to drive down the price to the point you could design it into a laptop or device for little more than the price of a cable and associated connectors. In fact at some point, I would have expected to see WUSB to be sold as IP modules for chip designers to include in new, highly integrated SOC designs just as we see USB and PCI-e bus controllers in today's chips ... where those bus controllers are just a peripheral component to the main function and the actual cost of designing in that bus is relatively insignificant compared to the overall cost of the project.
WUSB and UWB have more or less the same performance as wired USB, when operating in native mode. (As opposed to using the WUSB "Wire Adapter" protocol wrapper, which injects a lot of latency into each transfer.) Sure, the convenience of being wireless was expected to demand a price premium at first, but the key point was simply to be able to walk into a room with a device and just be connected - without any wires.
Having wireless peripherals is a huge advantage for both device and laptop manufacturers - take a look at the Apple Airbook. If you eliminate the need for ANY peripheral connectors, a laptop computer can be incredibly thin. In fact with up-coming OLED display technology and the increasing adoption of integrated solid state storage media, you may begin to see laptop / tablets that are just a few millimeters thick. (Though providing power will be interesting.) Without something like UWB and WUSB, you'll be stuck with transfer rates of no more than 100Mb/s or less using somewhat more complex, though more mature WiFi technologies. UWB and WUSB can double or quadruple those rates and at least in theory, they can do it at a fraction of the power required by WiFi. We know this well works - have any of you seen a Wireless Kensington Dock? Video, audio and mass storage available wirelessly? Just try to get all that over WiFi.
BTW, Today's BlueTooth v2.1 specification has only a bit over 2Mb/s available theoretical. Most people quote it as only 1Mb/s because of protocol overhead. At such a slow data rate, it is completely inappropriate for many of the applications that USB can be used for. However, the proposed BlueTooth 3.0 specification actually piggybacks on the WiMedia UWB specification as a PAL (Protocol Adaptation Layer), just like WUSB. This give BlueTooth 3.0 the potential to be just as fast as WUSB. However, BlueTooth 3.0 requires backwards compatibility by requiring devices to possess radios that can operate in both the older 2.1 channels and over the UWB bands. While this actually simplifies new development work somewhat for BlueTooth members, it does so by requiring a much larger and more complex chipset. How quickly BlueTooth members can drive down the cost of BlueTooth 3.0 is a big open question; but WUSB is/was likely to stay ahead of BlueTooth 3.0 on the price / performance curve for several years to come - so don't expect BlueTooth to just magically replace WUSB any time soon.
Joel Corley
Senior Software Architect,
Windows Device Driver Development,
(formerly of) WiQuest Communications, Inc.