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You can use USB cables to charge phones, tablets, media players, and all sorts of other gadgets. One day you may also be able to charge a laptop using a USB cable. The USB Implementer’s Forum has adopted a new standard for USB Power Delivery which supports delivering up to 100W via a USB cable.

In other words, you may eventually be able to use the same cable to charge your laptop and your smartphone.

Laptop Magazine caught up with the folks at USB-IF at CES last week, and got a look at a laptop that had been retrofitted with support for a shiny new USB Power Delivery system.

What’s cool is that the laptop was able to both draw power and send data over the same cable. So by hooking it up to the USB port on a monitor, the laptop is powered by the display — and at the same time it’s sending images and video to the same display.

While laptop makers will probably continue to ship power supplies with laptops for the foreseeable future, eventually you may get  a power brick and  a USB cable instead of a power brick and a special cable with a tip that only fits your brand of laptop. And that means you’ll be able to use that same brick to charge your phone, tablet, or other devices when you’re not using it to power or charge your laptop.