The Goldfish Chronicles

I’m usually a very canny shopper. True I’ve made my mistakes, it took me two Sharp Zaurii to realise that I no longer had any need for a PDA, I bought the Hauppauge PVR-350 when a 250 would have been fine (and much cheaper) and I continue to be drawn into buying games from the makers of Europa Universalis (good in principle, always buggy); however usually I do pretty well.

A month or so ago, I bought some bits. I’d been correctly stingy and avoided buying a new ipod/iriver to replace my original ipod (whose battery is almost dead and it’s just getting out of date); but then I slipped and threw an Apple Airport Express into the basket. A week later, I was holding a white lump of plastic, a small pamphlet manual and wondering just what the damn thing did.

Turns out the Airport Express is a bit of a jack of all trades. It’s not great at anything it does, but does have 4 core features.

1. USB print server.
2. Wireless access point.
3. Wireless booster.
4. HiFi/Stereo connector.

The problem is, these just aren’t very exiting.

1. We upgraded a while back to a wireless printer, so a separate print server is unnecessary. Plus you can probably get a wireless print server from Hawking or somebody for less money.
2. Few need an access point instead of a router/firewall/access-point/switch. I can see some need for this as tying the access point to the router causes wireless network speed issues when the switch gets busy.
3. Boosting a wireless signal appears pretty complicated. Apple only push it for use with their Extreme router, but that’s typical Apple. It can apparantly work with my Linksys router, but that has a great signal so I’ve no need for any boosting.
4. A nice idea, but it doesn’t work. I originally thought this meant that I could have something in the basement broadcasting FM to the stereos. I had visions of programming a repeating loop and broadcasting to the house. Instead all it does is allow you to use the HiFi speakers from your computer instead of the computer speakers.

The last point is the one that was most interesting. Although I misunderstood the feature when first reading the marketing, it still seemed like a useful concept. I have an iTunes server running in the basement and loved the idea of attaching the server to the HiFi and having it play an album. This isn’t possible, you have to attach an iTunes instance (on say your laptop) to the server and then play to the speakers. This means your laptop is a part of the network needed to play the music, and if it happens to be 802.11b then you’re out of luck as it won’t be able to keep up.

The one redeeming feature would be if you could attach a USB drive (such as an iPod) to the express and play the music from that. A firewire variant would be nice, but I understand that this would drive up the price. If they were to add a firewire slot, then they could attempt to muscle in on the nslu-2 market.

So overall, the express seems to be an item that does many things, but none of them well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.