Some of the early reviews for the first Certified Wireless USB PC Accessory products are now coming to press. Many of them are not particularly flattering. Some of the comments are valid enough. Others I think are a bit off base. What I find interesting, however, is how so many reviewers don’t seem to learn from the past and have conducted essentially baseless and rather useless reviews of these first products.

One of the first class of products to reach the market are classified and typically sold as a Wireless USB hub and adapter. This is an unfortunate choice of marketing, but that is the situation. The typical reviewer then does a comparison between the wireless product and its wired counterpart. That sounds fair enough . . . but is it really? Is it relevant to compare the throughput of the wireless product against the wired product? You wouldn’t compare the speed of your WiFi adapter against the integrated gigabit Ethernet adapter in your PC would you? No contest – the Ethernet wire always wins. Likewise, you wouldn’t compare the voice quality of your cell phone against your traditional analog voice line. Rather, you weigh whether or not it is good for its intended use. I for one, consider my cell phone far more convenient for making phone calls on-the-run vs. looking for a pay phone – even if the voice quality is lacking. My point is, reviews should be based upon how people are likely to use a product and whether or not it is helpful for that use.

So, what uses is a wireless hub best suited for? Probably many things, but the ones most developers have in mind for now are: Wireless USB access to a standard PC printer and Wireless USB access to an external hard drive. In your home, this means you would be sitting on the couch in your den with your laptop, and could wirelessly connect to a printer that is plugged into the wireless hub sitting on the desk behind you (remember, this is a cable replacement –e.g. in room technology – not an alternative for a whole house network). It also means, that from the couch with your laptop, you would be able to wirelessly transfer files to a HDD, which is also plugged into the wireless hub sitting on the desk behind you. For printing, the throughput of the wireless hub and plugged-in printer is more than adequate and in fact very convenient. If a reviewer wants to make a comparison, compare the convenience of laying a 16-foot USB cable on the floor from your laptop to the printer. Compare getting up and moving around with your laptop while it’s tethered to that cable.  In the wireless case – no problem. In the wired case, you just knocked over a lamp and taught your kids a new curse word sequence. The Wireless USB hub wins hands down. It is also amusing to compare flash drive usage. Tell me, who is going to get up from the couch and their laptop, walk across the room, plug their USB flash drive into their wireless hub, then walk back over to the couch and sit down? Nobody of course. They would just plug the flash drive directly into a port on the side of their laptop and wirelessly connect to the hub. The wired vs. wireless comparisons are like testing a hub to see what kind of paper weight it makes (not very good). Wrong paradigm.

In summary, I find it a bit disappointing that reviewers are making comparisons against wired products, instead of reviewing the Wireless USB products for the new, convenient applications they enable. It will always be true that a wired connection will communicate faster than a wireless link. What makes wireless products unique is their mobility and convenience. That is what a Life Without Wires™ is all about. That isn’t to say the first products on the market are perfect or flawless. They aren’t. But they do bring a new form of convenience to the market that hasn’t been available before: the familiar USB plug-and-play and ease of use, including backward compatibility to important USB devices such as printers and external hard drives.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Wireless USB. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.