USB, Bluetooth the tops in digital interfaces

Here's a survey result that should surprise no one who has fallen in love with a useless but fun USB gadget: the interface is the most popular and most used on both home and business computers.

For cell phones, Bluetooth pretty much tops the list.

Flash drives topped the list of devices connected to computers via USB, followed by printers and digital still cameras. The survey, conducted by In-Stat, did not delve deep enough, it appears, to determine how many people have the USB toaster or ashtray.

For home and business use, 1394/FireWire, Bluetooth, DVI and HDMI rounded out the list of the most popular digital interfaces. But when it came to cell phones, Bluetooth was quite popular — more than half the survey respondents had the technology on their mobile phones and of those, nearly 60 percent used for a headset.

HDMI, however, seems to be quite popular for people to use their computers to stream television over their digital televisions. More than a quarter of those surveyed who had HDMI ports on their computers said they used it to connect the two devices. It's possible that could provide a boon for the Time Warner experiment that brings original cable programming online.

The survey was conducted online with 1,379 respondents in October in the United States. They were queried about what they connected to their computers with these interfaces and all sorts of other details, but the entire survey costs $1,995, so you'll have to cope with what could be garnered from the abstract and the condensed BusinessWire version.