Back when it launched, the Linksys DMA-2200 Wireless Media Extender retailed for a cool $350. Capable of streaming content from your Windows Media Center in one room, to your big-screen HDTV in another, the DMA-2200 faired reasonably in reviews, hindered by its big sticker price. Now, though, Newegg are listing the DMA-2200 for just $94.99 with free shipping, at which point it becomes a very tempting offer indeed.
Linksys were determined to compare their Wireless Home Audio System to Sonos, rather than Logitech, when we spoke to them at CES, but that hasn’t stopped Digital Trends from making just that comparison in their review of the streaming audio system. The good news is that the setup – which consists of a variety of WiFi-linked standalone boomboxes, HiFi adapters and media servers, together with a large-screen remote – certainly delivers on audio quality.
Linksys by Cisco have been demonstrating their new Wireless Home distributed media system at CES 2009, a Sonos-rivalling system that includes the standalone Conductor DMC350 with integrated touchscreen control and CD player, the Director DMC250 media player with integrated 50W-per-channel amp, and the Player DMP100 for connection to an existing amplified setup. Each can access media from across your home network or the internet, together with internet radio.
The picture might not suggest it, but this is actually a very clever power socket. The work of Phil Endecott, it’s actually linked up to a Linksys NSLU2, the network storage device known as the ”Slug”; he uses it to switch on and off his seldom-used printer remotely from elsewhere on his network.
Linksys have released their latest WiFi router, the WRT610N, the claim to fame of which is its ability to simultaneously maintain WiFi band-N connections on both 2.4GHz and 5GHz. The benefit is in being able to use each band for separate, bandwidth intensive applications; 5GHz has a shorter range but higher throughput, while 2.4GHz is backward compatible with earlier WiFi versions that would usually slow the whole network down.
Oh, all this WiFi N business makes me chuckle, they don’t even have a set standard, its still in draft stages, and they have been selling the hardware for like a year or something like that, so dumb. Anyways, Linksys is bringing you the latest from Draft 2.0.
It uses a Broadcom chipset for dual-band 802.11n goodness and even had gigabit Ethernet ports. You can even hook up an external USB drive and make it into and NAS as well.
Thanks to an “accidentally” published preview, we knew Linksys had a couple of Vista-compatible Media Center Extenders in the works; now they’ve dropped the coy act and restored the teaser page complete with some high-res shots of the boxes themselves.
It never fails to surprise me how many companies can’t seem to manage updating their sites to schedule – either you have a recently launched product missing from the pages altogether, or something new “accidentally” goes live before the PR department would like it to. Today Linksys are the careless ones, putting teaser details of their Vista-compatible 808.11n Media Center Extenders online then whipping them down again.
Apparently a story that we reported on earlier today was not entirely correct. In fact, it was completely inaccurate. We reported earlier that Cisco was planning on ditching the Linksys name in favor of using the Cisco name on all of their products.
[Update] It’s always a sad day when a brand that we’ve grown to know and love meets its tragic end. This usually happens when a company is acquired by another, then after a period of transition, the name is dropped. Some names like Compaq have stuck around for some time. Linksys, however, is not so lucky.
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