Linksys is moving from your office to your home entertainment center. We tested the company’s latest batch of wireless media devices, including the Wireless-B Media Adapter, the Wireless-B Internet Video Camera, Wireless-B Game Adapter and the Wireless-G Game Adapter.
Linksys is moving from your office to your home entertainment center. We tested the company’s latest batch of wireless media devices, including the Wireless-B Media Adapter, the Wireless-B Internet Video Camera, Wireless-B Game Adapter and the Wireless-G Game Adapter. In addition to making a household multimedia experience more complete (and wireless), Linksys also provides you with some cool multimedia tools.
As a group, the wireless devices were very adept in their design, bringing together current media technology and making it available to users anywhere in the house without the need for rewiring or having to move devices to new locations. While there are areas in which the products can be improved when they’re first introduced to the market (price and ease of use come to mind), overall, these measure up to our expectations.
The video camera transfers digital images through a stand-alone Web interface and included motion-sensing capabilities that could send e-mail alerts when motion was detected. The media adapter makes available both audio and video content on a PC to a home entertainment center (stereo and TV). And the game adapters connect gaming consoles to a wireless network, which you can then use for LAN gaming or Internet gaming.
While we were generally pleased with the equipment, overall we disliked the Linksys discovery application, which always needed to be installed on a PC in order to configure the devices. We would prefer if it came configured with a default IP address or a default SSID so we could access it via a Web browser.
We were very impressed with the Wireless-B Media Adapter ($200) and its ability to bring PC multimedia content to a consumer entertainment market. The Media Adapter creates a wireless link between a PC and entertainment center, and lets the user play audio and video files from the PC. The device required that we configure a software application on the PC that works as a media server, but it was as basic as any Media Player application you might be currently using to listen to music or watch videos on your PC (such as Windows Media Player, RealOne Player or MusicMatch).
You control the device with a remote control and a user interface on the TV screen. Once the software application and Media Adapter are configured, you have complete access to JPG, GIF, TIF and BMP images residing on the PC, as well as audio files such as MP3 or WMV files. You can also play music and view images simultaneously.
The Wireless-B Internet Video Camera ($190) was very easy to set up, and worked as advertised. It offered an average video experience, but its mobility made it an improvement over a wired network camera. The ability to place the camera anywhere there is power is a nice feature and gave us more options for placing the camera. We were impressed with the motion-sensing features and e-mail alert capabilities. We would like to see Linksys add some pan, tilt and zoom features, as well as a larger image size, though.
The two game adapters (Wireless-B Game Adapter [$80] and Wireless-G Game Adapter [$130]) bring wireless Ethernet capabilities to console gaming. The Playstation 2 (through its add-on Network Adapter) and Xbox (built-in) have Ethernet ports that offer LAN or Internet gaming. With a wired or wireless Ethernet-connected console, online gaming becomes possible. The two wireless gaming adapters we tested take this a step further, by offering ad hoc (console-to-console) or infrastructure (through an access point) networking. Both devices were fairly easy to configure, although like the other devices they required some skill and knowledge in network configuration.
Overall, we were pleased with these products for their features and functions. All four devices could use improvement in the configuration process (we could do without a software installation), yet were still relatively easy and effective. The software distributed with the devices, designed to probe your network and find the devices before being able to configure them for wireless was effective, but slowed down the install process, and also required that we connect a PC to the network. If there was an easier pre-configured SSID or Web interface for configuration, it would have made for a better installation experience.
Hebenstreit is a senior network engineer at Network World. He can be reached at phebenstreit@nww.com.
