Product Description

Now with blazing 802.11n, the affordable AirPort Express is powerful enough to run a home Wi-Fi network, yet small enough to take on the road. Share your wireless network with up to 10 users, print documents, photos, and more from any room in the house to one central printer, play iTunes music through your stereo or powered speakers using AirTunes, and more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #225 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Apple
• Model: MB321LL/A
• Platforms: Macintosh, Windows
• Format: CD
• Dimensions: 3.70" h x 1.12" w x 2.95" l, .42 pounds

Features

• Take the music from the iTunes library on your computer and sends it wirelessly to any stereo or speakers in your home
• Print wirelessly through AirPort Express--its almost like having a printer in every room of the house
• Wirelessly share photos, movies, and other files without having to worry about slow data transmissions
• The AirPort Express Base Station now features 802.11n, the next-generation high-speed wireless technology included with most shipping Mac computers and some newer PCs with compatible cards
• Industry-standard encryption technologies built into AirPort Express, including WPA/WPA2 and 128-bit WEP, plus a built-in firewall that creates a barrier between your network and the Internet

From the Manufacturer

Faster Is Better
Now with blazing 802.11n, the affordable AirPort Express is powerful enough to run a home Wi-Fi network, yet small enough to take on the road. Here's some of the ways you can integrate it into your home.

Music AirTunes takes the music from the iTunes library on your computer and sends it wirelessly to any stereo or speakers in your home. All you have to do is plug an AirPort Express into an electrical outlet near those speakers, then connect them with an audio cable. In iTunes, you can choose which speakers you want your music to play on--in your den, living room, or bedroom. If you have more than one AirPort Express connected to speakers, you can play the same music on all your speakers at the same time to create a whole-house musical experience. Plus, if you already have a wireless network in place, you can use AirPort Express to add music to its capabilities.

Wireless Printing With wireless printing through AirPort Express, it’s almost like having a printer in every room of the house. AirPort Express uses the Mac- and PC-compatible Bonjour networking technology to let everyone in the house take advantage of one centrally available printer. Wirelessly, of course. If all you want to do is access your USB printer wirelessly, you don’t even need a broadband Internet connection. You can just set up your AirPort Express for wireless printing and that’s it.

Internet Sharing With AirPort Express connected to your DSL or cable modem, up to 10 users at a time can surf the web, send email, annihilate the competition in multiplayer games, and much more--wire-free. AirPort Express connects people to each other as well. You can wirelessly share photos, movies, and other files without having to worry about slow data transmissions. Nor do you have to concern yourself with a difficult network setup. AirPort Express uses the Bonjour technology in Mac OS X to allow your AirPort-equipped Mac computers running Mac OS X to find each other with no effort on your part--they discover each other just by virtue of being in range of the network.Compact and portable, AirPort Express is also a great way to share Internet access when you go on the road.

802.11n The AirPort Express Base Station now features 802.11n, the next-generation high-speed wireless technology included with most shipping Mac computers and some newer PCs with compatible cards. Based on an IEEE 802.11n draft specification, AirPort Express features two antennas and uses a technology called multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) to transmit multiple data streams simultaneously. The result? AirPort Express delivers data transfer speeds up to five times those of previous-generation 802.11g wireless networks--while achieving up to twice the range. And with its support for both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless frequencies, AirPort Express reduces the possibility of interference from appliances and cordless phones that use the 2.4GHz frequency.

Compatibility
Part Wi-Fi access point. Part wireless router. AirPort Express just works, seamlessly and wirelessly, with all your Wi-Fi devices. In fact, it’s the easiest way for everyone in your family to share a single broadband Internet connection and USB printer without messy cables.

Security The AirPort Express Base Station takes strong measures to keep your online world as safe as possible--from securing your base station to preventing outside intruders. It starts with the industry-standard encryption technologies built into AirPort Express, including WPA/WPA2 and 128-bit WEP.1 When you turn on encryption--easy to do using AirPort Utility--you’ll ensure that only people with the correct password can join your wireless network. AirPort Express includes a built-in firewall that creates a barrier between your network and the Internet. When you set up the base station, the firewall is automatically turned on to keep the bad guys out. For computers with a cable or DSL modem, using AirPort is actually safer than being directly connected to the modem.

AirPort Utility
If you think setting up a wireless network is difficult, think again. AirPort Utility for Mac and Windows guides you through the process, and you’ll have your network up and running in minutes. AirPort Utility does most of the work for you by stepping you through the setup process quickly and easily. For the most basic setup, all you have to do is plug your AirPort Express into an electrical outlet and connect your DSL or cable modem. Then open the AirPort Utility software and just follow the onscreen instructions.

AirPort Express works effortlessly with any computer that uses Wi-Fi standards, whether it’s a Mac or a Dell, HP, IBM, or any other Windows-based PC. That’s because the AirPort Express is compatible with computers using the 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g specifications, and it also works with computers that are 802.11n draft 2.0 compliant.

Customer Reviews

Not bad but not stunning either
It works OK and has the nice Airtunes feature (allows you to stream audio from your Mac gadget to the router which has an headphones jack) which however only works with iTunes. Also the setup utility is a bit cumbersome. Definitely prefer a web based interface. The USB only supports a printer so no HDD can be hooked up. There's a number of better and cheaper routers out there but they ain't Apple ;)

Amazing!
Music used to be a huge part of my life; I almost always had something playing on the stereo. Then we moved to a larger house, and it seemed like the music stopped. Our nicest stereo was in the living room. Our CD collection was upstairs, though some of it was on the computer in the office. And we spent most of our time in other parts of the house. It's long been a dream of mine to play the same music throughout the house; with the Airport Express, this dream became a reality, and I'm listening to music all of the time again.

I bought one to give it a try; this let me stream music from my Vista PC to the living room stereo on the same floor (while still playing via the PC speakers). I was hooked, and immediately copied the rest of our CDs to the computer.

After a few weeks, I bought another AirPort Express to stream the music to a pair of powered speakers upstairs (Creative Labs GigaWorks T40 Premium 2.0 Multimedia Speaker System with BasXPort Technology). All three music sources (the computer and the two Airport Express-connected speaker systems) are always in sync and drop outs have been very rare. It's really quite amazing; you can walk throughout the house and hear the same music everywhere. Of course you want to be able to control the music from where you are in the house, so I bought an Apple iPod touch 8 GB (2nd Generation) to use as a remote (the iPhone works as well). The whole setup is just so cool!

I recently bought a third Airport Express. I don't stream music through this one; I use it as a wireless bridge to allow an old iMac without a wireless card to access my network. This one performs flawlessly; you set it up and forget it. I could also stream music through this one if I had another pair of speakers to connect to it.

Although I think this is an amazing product, I almost docked it one star because the setup and interoperability with non-Apple hardware isn't as seamless as it should be.

I connected my first two Airport Expresses to a non-Apple Wireless G access point (a 2WIRE DSL router). For security reasons, I do not broadcast the SSID on my wireless network. I could not get the AirPort Expresses to join my network with the SSID broadcast off (even though I typed in the network name); I had to broadcast the SSID, join them to the network, then stop broadcasting the SSID. That wasn't that big of deal, but it took me at least 30 minutes to figure it out and it's not how it should work. These units also had a tendency to drop out of the AirPort utility software when they connected via this access point.

When I got the third one, I bought an Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station (Gigabit) MB053LL/A to use as my main access point (these can't act as a bridge on a non-Apple wireless network). I set this up as Wireless-N only, I still use the old access point for B/G.

The third AirPort Express also had setup problems- the AirPort Utility software couldn't communicate with it until I did a factory reset. After the factory reset, it was easy as pie, though. I had no problems joining the AirPort Expresses to the Apple base station, even with the SSID broadcast turned off. So, in my experience, these do work with non-Apple access points, but they work much better with an Apple base station. On the plus side, the AirPort Utility works well under Windows; I don't think you need a Mac to get the most out of this.

Those minor hassles aside, this is the most impressive computing/home entertainment product that I've seen in a long time- it's somewhat expensive, but you get a lot of features for your money. Highly Recommended!

Simple, clean, functional, Apple.
I have 3 Airport Expresses in my home with which I stream my music to multiple speakers through iTunes. This is one of the main features of the Airport Express and it works flawlessly. If you are a Mac/iTunes user and want a way to "party-up" your house with continuous music from room to room, this is the way to go. It's easy to use, much less expensive than a Sonos system, and these units are great to travel with if you need to make a quick wireless network.