2. Easy Connections With UWB

UltraWide Band and Wireless USB (which is based on UWB) have been in development for a while, but this year we'll see the first products. Early this summer, Toshiba will ship a UWB docking station for the sleek Portégé R400 tablet; other Toshiba models will work with it at a later date. Bring your notebook into range - three or four feet - and it connects all the ports automatically. That means sound, video, USB and networking - if you've got a monitor, speakers, keyboard, mouse, printer, scanner or digital camera connected to the docking station, while you're in range it's as if they're plugged in to your notebook. Even better, the 480 Mbps bandwidth is fast enough for the DVI connection using a standard called Wireless Digital Video (WiDV). Pick up your machine and walk away and everything disconnects automatically. There's no price for the docking station yet, but the R400 is a wallet-emptying $2,599.

UWB will send full-quality HD video wirelessly with this adapter from Philips.

Philips is also using UWB for its $300 SWW1800 HDMI adapter (on sale in May), which lets you send 1080p video from a PC, DVD drive or set-top box to a screen up to 25 feet away. That means you can get media from your PC to your TV without drilling through the wall or filling up all your power sockets with HomePlug adapters. The signal isn't compressed, so you shouldn't notice any difference from a cable connection.

Wireless USB (or Certified Wireless USB to distinguish it from some proprietary wireless systems with similar names) will finally hit the market this year. The chips and reference platforms from companies like WiQuest and Artimi are ready, and Belkin will soon release an adapter and hub to convert USB devices to wireless based on the WiQuest design. We'll see laptops with Wireless USB built in by the middle of the years and then cameras, mobile phones and hard drives by Christmas. Some of those devices will be able to send information to another device, so you could back up information from one hard drive to another, or send a photo to a friend's camera. Artimi has demonstrated a system that can transfer a gigabyte of photos in 30 seconds, letting you send the images directly to a printer from the camera. Artimi doesn't expect camera manufacturers to build its technology into cameras directly until the first half of 2008, but we should see an add-on version this year, with a USB dongle for your PC and an adapter for a camera dock (because the adapter needs power). That means you could plug the camera in where it's convenient for charging, not just where the USB cable will stretch to.

Samsung has also demonstrated a camera dock with Wireless USB built in; initially, it will let you transfer images to your PC, or play back video directly from the camera. Samsung has plans to let you stream video from the camera to a DNLA-equipped TV or set-top box as well, so you can see your photos and videos on TV without having to plug in extra cables. The company is also working on a version of the D365 wireless camcorder for streaming and uploading video.

Fujifilm is sticking with low power infrared connectivity for transferring images wirelessly, first in the F31, and soon in other cameras.

Fujifilm is picking a simpler wireless connection - infrared. It already has the high-speed IrSimple infrared port in the F31, and it will add it to several more cameras this year. This will let you transfer an image to another camera or an IrSimple-equipped PC or PDA (but those aren't common outside the Far East).