Hi, my name is Dan, and I have a gadget problem. As I write this, my entertainment console is stuffed to the gills: I have a DVD player, a VCR, a TiVo, a CD jukebox, an A/V receiver, a Wi-Fi adapter, a Slingbox, a Xitel surround-sound simulator, and a wide-screen projector. The devices I don't mind so much, but the cables are driving me nuts. It's a no-man's-land behind that console--I need a wireless solution fast, before something blows up.

Last time I wrote about this topic, devices employing Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology were still on the horizon. Now, the first commercial UWB product is finally arriving, and overall it looks pretty good. But the glorious wireless future comes with a few strings attached. For one thing, it will be limited largely to PCs, at least initially.

Wires, Be Gone

I played with a preproduction version of Belkin's Cable-Free USB Hub ($199), which should be available by the time you read this. The four-port hub connects to your PC sans wires. Plug a dongle the size of a thumb drive into a PC's USB 2.0 port, plug the hub into a power outlet, install half a dozen drivers, and you're in business. This would be useful for, say, a printer or a backup drive stashed on another shelf (and not at all useful for things like mice or USB headphones).

The Belkin product worked much like a regular USB hub: I could access files on a mini-drive, grab clips off a digital camcorder, even power up my iPod. The company says you can run multiple hubs off a single dongle, though I didn't test that.

Some things didn't quite work as advertised, however. According to Belkin, the hub should connect up to 30 feet away in a straight line (provided no walls stand in between); but when I wandered more than 8 or 10 feet away, the connection dropped (it automatically reconnected when I got back in range). In my informal tests, the hub moved a 1GB file from an external drive to my PC in about 12 minutes on each of my two passes, or a bit over 11 mbps--fairly impressive.

Because UWB is much faster than Wi-Fi and requires far less power, it's likely to be found in portable devices such as cell phones and MP3 players, says Eric Broockman, CEO of Alereon, maker of UWB chip sets. He gave a practical demonstration last fall by beaming photos from a Kodak camera to a PC using Alereon UWB technology (no word on when you will be able to buy such a camera).

UWB-powered USB ports, which will eliminate the need for a dongle, are also likely to become a common feature on PCs. In-Stat predicts nearly 300 million UWB devices will be sold worldwide by 2010, two-thirds of them for PCs, says In-Stat research analyst Chris Kissel.