This is the reference design for certified wireless USB (running in a hard disk drive), for which products should appear around the back end of this year.

Certified Wireless USB chips will appear in products such as hard disk drives, digital cameras, PCs and once small enough, mobile phones, we were told.

Provided you have a Wireless USB key (dongle) that conforms to the standard, it means that you can connect various devices to a PC, so that they can communicate and pass files without wires.

For some reason, Staccato Communications, one of the companies working on the technology, would not let us take a picture of the actual dongle, but it looks exactly the same current USB keys.

Up to 127 devices can be supported, so in theory, there shouldn't be any problems caused by interference. Range is going to be similar to Bluetooth, so generally devices will talk to each other when up to about 10m apart, and transfer rates are up to 480Mb/s.