Airport Extreme Base Station
Welcome to another of my reviews, like all my reviews, it starts with a need for a product, in this case, it was waking up to find my Belkin cable wireless router was knackered, i have a two stage network setup, in the form of:
Internet comes in, to wired router, where my wired computers are connected, then a Ethernet cable connects to a wireless cable router to provide me my wireless network.
Anyway, back to the story, i woke up, and it was kaput, buggered, dead.
So this lead me to my purchase, i had a quick poke around the usual computer shopping sites i look at (ebuyer, scan overclockers etc), and there were some impressive offerings from Belkin, D-link etc etc... but i felt that since my other Apple products, when bought, did exactly what they said, for long periods of time, and really quite well, that i should invest some more of my hard earned with apple once again, prior to this i have been a loyal Belkin fan, i have had a new wireless router every single year, not by choice, but because i have personally found that Belkin routers die out once a year...
Anyway, onto the review, ....
Nice box arrived for me
Like all apple products, open the perfectly sized cardboard box, and out pops a perfectly sized, perfectly wedged white box
Typical apple style packaging, very plain, basic, simple, says what it has to say, no more, no less. Clean, modern, design, very sharp, very crisp...
Well worthy of a few more pics...
As you can see, all the information you may need, nothing you don't need to know, all laid out perfectly on the back of the box, no immature flashy logo's, no over-designed packaging, no immature pictures, just clean, and tidy.
Open it up and you soon see that everything has been well thought through, for £139.00 you would however expect no less.
lets see what we have here then when emptied:
- Airport Extreme Base Station
- Power Adapter
- U.K. Standard Power Cable
- Packet Containing Instructions etc
Now lets have a look at ports on the back:
We have:
- Power Slot
- USB
- Input Ethernet
- 3 Output Ethernet
- Security lock
The underside of the Airport Extreme is almost entirely rubber, this will make sure it doesnt go walkies even on slippery surfaces, again, well thought through in this reviewers opinion
The front of the Airport Extreme is rather plain, it doesn't contain the usual plethora of flashing lights i have been accustomed to:
This can be a blessing and a curse, for those who don't want to know when activity is going on, and just want a device to work, this is a blessing, its simple, green means its on and working, orange means theirs a problem....could it be any more simple?
And as i mentioned before, i like plain, i like simple, i don't like cheesy rubbish in my products, i like modern, futuristic, clean, tidy, and generally nice.
Here's the setup beforehand:
Lets get rid of that Belkin and clean things up a bit ....
Tadah, out with the old, in with the new
The next bit is where it gets a little bit more complicated, setting the device up was more difficult than i anticipated...at first, scanning on my Macbook pro i could not find the airport extreme...however, after about 5 minutes, it decided to show up on my list, at which point, i connected to it, and then it automatically launched the airport utility for Mac, which then was actually a doddle to set up, i simply said yes i want to connect via WiFi, yes i want to use the DHCP server of my other router, this was my only wireless network, and then a bit of security, name the network, and all done.
That was it, no IP address to enter in my Firefox, it just ...worked, like i expected of all apple products, the only downside i see to this is that there is no disk included, and so if you wanted to set it up on a PC it would be difficult, as you would need the airport app
Although, i am happy to report this can be done from iOS devices, such as iPod, iPhone, iPad, with an airport app that is free, from App Store.
Anyway, time to wrap this one up...
Conclusion
Pro's
- Stylish Looks
- Simple Design
- Simple Interface
- Easy to set up
Averages
- Expensive
- Trade off of Simple one light for Many
Bad
- No DSL modem built in
