The universal serial bus protocol is used for the connection between a computer and its peripherals such as portable media players, network adapters and digital cameras. Apart from data transmission a USB cable is also able to supply power. It is thanks to this combination that the USB cable has become the standard for portable devices such as smartphones and tablets.
USB 3.0 adds the new transfer rate referred to as SuperSpeed USB (SS) that can transfer data at up to 5 Gbit/s (625 MB/s), which is about ten times as fast as the USB 2.0 standard.