Welcome to the inaugural episode of our second series, 'Our Tech', contributed to by all members of the TB Tech editorial staff.
To accommodate our frequent in-depth reviews of the latest technology, we need reliable and always-on tech ourselves. As many of you will already know, we love admire Apple products for their reliability and good track record in our labs.
Wireless internet performance is a defining factor in our reviews of products equipped with a WiFi receiver, and for that, you need a new and practical WiFi router. Our older-style Netgear 802.11g arrangement was beginning to get fairly long in the tooth, so after seeing the Apple Time Capsule on video, and on apple.com/au, I decided that this would be a worthwhile investment.
But how did we get our hands on one so soon, you ask? A family member of mine takes frequent trips to the U.K., so I asked him to swing by Apple's flagship European store, on Regent Street in London. At 199 pounds (approx. A$430), it's not a cheap router, but it scores extra first-impression points for featuring the draft 802.11n wireless spec, a 500gb server-grade hard drive (1tb is also available) and likely Apple reliability.
Time Machine has been one of my favourite features of Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard' - on a desktop iMac here at the office it works brilliantly. But it has been inconvenient for my MacBook Pro and I to be tethered to an external hard drive at least once a day, so Time Capsule's ability to perform wireless Time Machine backups is outstanding.
I'll write up a review, for the sake of it, in the next few weeks. Despite an overly-complicated, Australian Optus-hating setup, it appears to be a strong-performing wireless router.
Tom Baker is the editor-in-chief of TB Tech News+Blog and its sister blog, SmartMobile. He is an expert in mobile computing and a frequent writer for TB Tech.
