FireWire 2 all but guaranteed to appear today at Macworld

“Several hours after announcing that it is introducing desktop hard drives that connect to Apple Computer Inc. computers using the new high-speed 800M bps (bits per second) FireWire standard, SmartDisk Corp. asked that the news be ‘killed due to premature release.’ The aborted news suggests that Steve Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple, may announce FireWire2, or FireWire 800, in his keynote speech at MacWorld Expo Tuesday. FireWire2 is the next generation of the Apple-invented standard. It supports data transfer at 800M bps and is backwards-compatible with computers and peripherals that support FireWire 1. It also works with USB (universal serial bus) 2.0-equipped Windows PCs. Neither SmartDisk nor Apple were immediately available to comment on the announcement and its subsequent withdrawal,” reports Gillian Law for the IDG News Service’s London Bureau. Full story here.