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Wireless USB hubs
HaggiZ writes "Here is alternative to the clutter of USB cables and keys sitting on your desk. Now Belkin has announced their own wire-free USB setup. It's a wireless USB hub, allowing your to plug devices into the hub and have your PC/laptop elsewhere and not need to worry about running cables along the livingroom or study to reach. Very handy for laptop users, I can imagine some very handy uses for so HTPCs as well. Shipping in spring for a shave under $130."
THIS, is a great idea that I can guaruntee will make money.
Personally, i expect to see one of these im my home. There have always been USB hubs, then there have been the wireless adapters (labelled for printers and such), but never a wireless hub (to my knowledge). WE have a couple digital cameras, a scanner, an external hard drive, and a mouse hooked up through USB. All but the mouse go through a USB 2.0 hub. When we move the laptop, usually we just disconnect the hub. now, it will be possible to just... well... go. =D
Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
Since last 20 years I have been looking at all those fscking interfaces and 'Plug and Prey' and so on. (no offence intended). USB offers fast reliable and clean interface, that really brings the device up and running in minutes.
Now this addition of wireless hub will make me more than happy.
"even the fastest wireless gaming mouses have a semi-noticable lag when you use them"
aka "i know it's wireless so i imagine lag that isn't there"?
For those who don't get it, the point of the hub is to provide a place where you can plug in your scanner, printer, and other external peripherals, providing them all with wireless functionality, without the scanner and printer actually having the wireless capability built in. Makes sense for those of us with lots of USB peripherals who also have a wireless laptop.
What's a little odd is that they aren't using bluetooth, but the article claims its 100x faster than bluetooth. Perhaps this opens up the idea of plugging in hard drives into a USB hub like this, either for backup, for extra workspace, or just a great way to store your extensive mp3/movie/pr0n collection.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
TFA claims you can use your USB devices "anywhere in the room". Looks like it might only be short range.
It looks very handy, but why should the PC need yet another wireless interface?
Surely with a clever enough driver, you could tunnel USB traffic over 802.11 (or even over TCP/IP). Make a USB hub that provides the server for this tunnelling client, and you'd wouldn't need a dongle.
While what I'm going to say may seem slightly off-topic at first, keep reading, please. On my last trip into Seoul, I went looking in the computer malls for a DivX player for several hours. These are easy to find and play movies or music of most formats through your TV with 5.1 sound. While I could build one myself, these are smaller (about the size of a cable modem or wireless router) and/or cheaper (about US$125) than a home-built solution. Oddly, they all worked off of a USB cable. You disconnect the DivX player from the A/V setup, carry it over to your computer, load the movie that you want to watch onto the flash RAM, reattach the player to the A/V setup, and play the movie. This seemed rather like a lot of work.
So, I asked for what I thought was an obvious feature -- to access a Samba share across a wireless (or even physical) network to play movies. After hours of talking to virtually every vendor and them making many phone calls to their suppliers, I found no DivX players with this faeture. One shop promised that it would be in the "next model."
It would be pretty easy for me to set up Geexbox to do this, but I really wanted the small form-factor at the small price. I expected that a network-aware player would cost more, but never suspected that one did not exist. It's not really important enough for me to spend over US$200 on, and I certainly want a setup that's small enough to take back home with me when I'm finished in Korea, so I guess that I'll pass on building my own and wait for that "next model."
Put identity in the browser.
Take a look at the USB specs, and the number of vendors deploying them. USB devices are 'trusted' where BT devices are 'paired'. BT in its first incarnation had an operation radius of 8m. With WiFi, the operational radius, given Defcon successes, might be nearly 200km (line of sight, no sun spots, nearby Schwarzchild radius, etc). So far, 8m vs 200km. Speed in payload is about 52x, USB 2.0 vs BT 1.1 spec.
BT is really designed as a paired communications medium (with dedicated voice channel) as a PAN setup utilizing OBEX (object exchange) and a few other interesting inter-device tricks. USB is a perhipheral connector and virtualizing the electrical part through wireless is a godsend. USB is more layer 1 & 2, where BT is a full stack.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Consider the Asus 500g Deluxe router. You can install Linux on it, in the form of openwrt(.org), or dd-wrt(google-it!); so long as your peripherals are all Linux peripherals. It has *2*, USB 2.0 ports in the back, and costs less, about 90 euros including tax. I imagine you can even daisy-chain extra USB peripherals using that old USB hub you discarded awhile ago. Besides USB ports, what's a (wireless!)dumb hub gonna do for you? Why not enjoy a full-on wireless Linux NAS file server/router/printer server/ ... and in the future web cam... (?)
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Most laptop users don't want things sticking out of their computers. I think it would be great if they made a reciever that went in ExpressCard/34 and PCMCIA slots. That way, people could always leave it in. And eventually have laptop manufacturers build it in to their hardware.
And exactly how does security on this thing work? Can you drive by and connect to the USB hub? Now that's a good way to completely take over most machines.