WIRELESS UBER ALLES – WIRELESS DEVICES STOOP TO CONQUER ?

Just seen the latest “must have” device - a wireless print server from SWEEX, which has USB ports and enables cable free printing. Wireless devices used to be expensive and considered too geeky for normal usage. However Joe User has now become wireless friendly with his wireless router, wireless adaptors, wireless laptop, wireless keyboard, wireless mouse, wireless PDA and wireless phone. So now we can print to our printer(s) from almost anywhere in the house / office.

Oh joy ! Picture this - I’m having a sly kip in the comfortable workshop chair, happily dreaming of what new project I’m going to pursue, when all of a sudden I’m awoken by the scraping of a printer drum coughing itself alive so that it can print its load of dead trees for the power user at the other end of the building. Another couple of moments like that and it will be getting unplugged sharply !!

UPDATE 1: about two years on from this original post things have changed. The wireless printer server wasn't the latest & greatest device as I had expected it to be, in fact it seems to be few & far between. I currently have a customer interested in one, but the price has actually risen since then, and now looks like to be around £80 installed. All the big vendors apart from Belkin and LinkSys seem to have pulled out of the market, and there seem to be issues regarding support for certain printers and MFC devices.

MAY 2007 UPDATE - well the customer decided that the Edimax wireless print server wasn't exactly how she envisaged it would work. She thought that they plugged into the printer just like a USB wireless adaptor and she could print from anywhere....... err, Nope, not exactly. So I have the device in my workshop now and it works just fine. (See blog about assets.....) Added the wee laser and the colour printer/scanner device to it. No probs. APART FROM it won't look at Linux, or to be accurate, the other way around, Linux won't look at the Edimax device. I'm sure that there is a solution. Working on it....... now, actually......