Airport Express Initial impressions

[Bananatree]

Airport Express.

The 2 words are were like a faint symphony in my ears until today. I will now let you all in on the wonderment that is wireless networking.

So today I got my ADSL hooked up in my new pad, and so I decided to call the computer department at London Drugs to see if they had my Airport Express base station ready, and they kind of did.

So I get to the store and ask them for my basestation and the lady pulls out this regular airport base station and tells me that I cannot buy it because she ordered it for her own customer. (I was going to let her sell me an airport extreme base station at the price quoted on my order (170 CAD instead of 299 CAD)).

So disapointed that I wouldn't be able to surf wirelessly for another day or two, I decided to look at the iPods and the collection of G4 iMacs (complete with out-dated copies of OSX!). Just when I was about to leave the store the sales-lady comes up to me and says "Is this what you ordered?" and so I walked out 200 dollars poorer and much happier than when I left.

Now for the real impressions:

Size/ergonomics/style:

This thing is little, pretty and extremely easy to work with. Plug into the wall, plug the lan cable in and it practically disapears from sight. The all white blends in with the wall-socket so I don't have to look at another ugly router. (My Linksys 4 port router is the ugliest thing in the entire world)

Features:

I plugged a mini-to-toslink cable into the audio out of the base station, set my iTunes to play in my bedroom and hit play. I haven't attempted to listen to the music, but there was infact a red-light coming from the end of the cable, ensuring that it did work. I'll need to try a few listening tests to see if the sound is at all compressed before transmission, although at 54 MB/s I'd be surprised if it needed it.

As of this review I have not attempted to use the base station as a wireless printing hub.

Functionality:

After installing something from the CD that apple supplied with the base station, the network was no more than a hop-skip and jump away from being set-up. Not longer after that I realized that with my ISP I had to get them to register my router before I could use it. However, that surely is not Apple's fault. (Of course not, and do not call me Shirley)

Overall:

With WiFi making leaps and bounds in the new-age, I think we are all going to be in for a real treat in the years to come. Saying that, I really belive that the Apple Airport Express is a clear look into the not-so-distant future of WiFi.

[Rumz]

As a stand-alone product I bet that thing rocks. I'm sure it also rocks if you use Mac.

For those that already have wireless networks and use something else as their primary base station besides an airport extreme, it seems that it's a little less awesome, simply because people have had difficulty setting it up as a client on their wireless networks... what I mean is that to use the iTunes functionality they have to disconnect from the internet and connect to the Express. I'm sure someone will figure out how to do use it and stay connected to the same wireless network for internet use, though.

I'd definitely look into this thing, though-- it looks pretty sweet. Thanks for the review