They finalized the design and spec, which means manufacturers can start putting it in their products. It's about the same size as micro-USB. They really did it right this time: Plug can be put in both ways; there's no more "wrong way" to do it There is no A or B side; the plug is the same on both ends Backwards compatible with current USB standard, which means there will be adaptors available Up to 10Gbps transfer speed (1250Mb/s) 100W power delivery capacity at 20V (USB 2.0 can do 2.5W at 5V), this means you'll be able to hook up a monitor to your computer with just one cable Cool nerd shit!
It's fully backwards compatible. I imagine the first cables will come with an adapter that will fit into current USB ports. It's funny, but also true.
5Gb/s=around 650MB/s, which is really fucking fast. Almost as fast as SATA III and over twice as fast as SATA II. The speed is probably bottlenecked by your harddrive/flash drive, not USB 3.0. HDDs don't go much over 150MB/s and the very fastest flash drives can do around 500MB/s.
This is what it'll look like on a laptop. HP just announced that they'll be putting it in upcoming models.
It does. It actually looks pretty close like this. The iPhone 5 has it already. The problem with Apple's "lightning" connector is that it's not universal, it's Apple proprietary. We'll only see this connector in Apple devices, and if someone else wants to use it, it'll cost them license fees. Plus, it's still a regular USB plug on the computer-side. USB 3C This will have the same benefits & more as this "lightning" cable, plus it'll be universal, plus it'll be the same on the both ends.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 12.2 tablet has already gone this route, unfortunately the adapter to fit this kind of plug in is only sold in Hong Kong, but found on Amazon. I've experienced no problems at all transferring data.