USB (or Universal Serial Bus) is a 13-year old standard that was originally designed to connect then smart phones to PCs in the mid-90s. It later became the de facto standard for connecting any external, thanks to USB’s built-in power supply and relatively fast speeds. The then-unique one-cable approach sparked a revolution that spawned everything USB (no pun intended) ranging from flash drives, hard drives, headsets, speakers, TV tuners to webcams. All these top at 12Mbps, at which speed is only good for mice and keyboards; so the official USB body upgraded the specs to USB 2.0, adding Hi-Speed USB mode operating at 480Mbps. As more applications moved on to wireless thereafter, the same group decided to follow the trend by cutting the wire in the latest Certified Wireless USB standard, completed in 2005. And now, we are currently in the pre-WUSB and SuperSpeed USB era.