I recently took delivery of an Apple Airport Express, a wireless base station with a number of different capabilities. This review will tell you a bit more about it and help if you're thinking of getting one yourself.
Apple always pays careful attention to the design of it's products packaging. The box itself comes packaged in another plain box to protect it. The Airport Express box has a sleeve and when taken out, folds open like a book to reveal the contents. There are even plastic tabs to help extract the contents with minimum hassle.
Inside the box you'll get the Airport Express itself, installation CD and a number of manuals in various languages. You'll need to have your own leads to use it. As the Airport Express can be used in many different ways, supplying leads with it would only unneccesarily add to the cost of it.
The Airport Express itself is a very simple unit. It Is shaped like a large charger, with a relatively slim body that should make it easy to find a space for it amongst your plug sockets. There are no buttons, other than a reset button hidden away which should very rarely need to be used. A single light on the front of the unit displays it's status through different combinations of colours.
There are 3 sockets present on the underside of the unit - an Ethernet socket, a USB socket and a 3.5mm audio socket. The Ethernet socket works up to Gigabit speeds. The USB socket is a 2.0 one capable of handling the higher speeds and the 3.5mm audio socket can be used with either conventional or optical leads. These sockets enable it to be used in a number of different ways.
Setup is relatively simple. The manual is clear and all that needs to be done is to install the Airport Utility, plug the Airport Express in and wait for it to finish initialising. Then scan for the Airport Express in Airport Utility, use the guide to fill in some essential information and you're away. I had to reset my wireless network to get it to recognise the Airport Express, although whether you have to do this or not will depend on your own network.
I am only using the Airport Express for the Airtunes feature at the moment. This allows you to play music from your iTunes collection on your computer wirelessly through remote speakers or a hi-fi. The real benefit of this feature is realised through the ability to control iTunes remotely via your iPhone or iPod Touch. This means that you can browse and listen to your entire collection easily. The only downside is that your computer must be on and running iTunes to do this.
Having a home server or a computer that will be on when you want to listen to your music will help greatly. I'd like to see Remote for the iPhone/iPod Touch have the option to open iTunes automatically when it is started to help make the process simpler.
Regardless, having the Airport Express really makes playing my music through my best speakers easy and I love being able to browse through my collection iPod-style complete with album artwork. The system operates with very little lag, even over a G network.
If you're enthusiastic about your music and have the money to spare, I'd certainly reccommemd this. If you can use it's other features such as adding wireless capability to an existing modem or wireless printing then it makes it an even more viable proposition.
The Airport Express is available from Amazon.co.uk where it can usually be found slightly cheaper than at the Apple Store.