Artimi's WUSB camera may be in 2008

Artimi, a fabless semiconductor company, has been working on wireless USB for cameras for the past while, and finally got to show off some of its prototypes at this year's CES. The deets were slim, however, and they've finally come clean with some more specs for our prying eyes. Of course, WUSB is no mystery. 480MB/s up to 10-feet, 110MB/s up to 30-ish-feet, along with the prestige of being the new "it" wireless standard for peripherals. Artimi is taking all that good bandwidth loving to the camera, and is teaming up with "several brand name camera vendors" to do it, the names of which it will announce in Q2. It'll cost manufacturers about $25 to add WUSB at the outset, but within 3 years that figure should be down to $10, and Artimi figures all but the cheapest cameras will have it by then. We might see a WUSB cam get launched in '07, but most likely we'll have to wait for '08 to roll around before this becomes a reality. Artimi also expects WUSB dongles to be fairly common by then, but the first-to-market products will most likely include a dongle just in case. As to battery life, these kids aren't too concerned, 'cause WUSB can toss 1GB of pics in about 30 seconds, so the chip doesn't need to be on for too long.

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