by Anna Filatova
12/20/2001 | 06:57 PM
The connection of peripheral devices to the PC via the USB interface is now simplified so immensely that the plug-in procedure and the settings adjustment have become completely "transparent". And we believe that most of you, guys, have already had some experience doing it and hence will agree with our statement. However, even such a simple standard as USB has its shoals. Here we mean high power consumption, pretty large port connectors, as well as the master-slave data exchange ideology, which requires a host to store the drivers and to supply the power to the slave-device thus managing the work of the connection. All these difficulties turn especially acute when you have to carry out the data transfer between a digital camera and a printer, a printer and a scanner, and a handheld PC and a mobile phone. In other words, when it has to do with the connection without a PC involved.
In order to make the operation of the new USB 2.0 standard also very easy and "transparent", the developers introduced the so called On-The-Go (OTG) thing. Yesterday we saw a new OTG revision on the official site of USB-IF Organization (Implementors Forum), which coordinates all the work connected with USB standards. The new revision is called Revision 1.0. Before that there used to be version 0.9, which came out in September 2001. All the info about the On-The-Go thing is available at the USB-IF site in a 1.4MB *.pdf-file.
The products supporting On-The-Go are expected to appear in Q1’02 already. Among the first ones to get the new port spec appeared Nokia and Ericsson companies.
In fact, the major goal of this addition to the existing USB 2.0 spec is to make it more competitive with the rivalry IEEE 1394 standard (FireWire) developed by Apple engineers. It is quite possible that On-The-Go is exactly the thing that will help the USB take the lead in the future.