MaximumPC.com is reporting that USB 3.0specs have been sent out ot manufacturers so that they can begin working on incorporating it into new products.

USB, short for Universal Serial Bus, is how the majority of items such as scanners, printers, iPods and more connect to computers.  The current plugins are 2.0 and transfer data at a rate 480 mega bits a second, but the new 3.0 will transfer data at 4.8 giga bits a second, ten times the current transfer rate.  So, when it took me 5 and a 1/2 hours to load a 119 GB of music on to my iPod, it would now take somwere under and hour.

We are also supposed to see the new standard charge devices more efficiently and in a quicker time , with less energy waste.  Luckily it is also going to be backwards compatible, so your 2.0 devices will still plug into the 3.0 slots and work, but you won’t see the speeds and such.

You can go to the original article to read more of the details, but this is a great thing for computing, and something we’ve needing more and more with each passing day, and even more demands for data transfers.