Apple Airport Express review

We feel your disappointment. You’ve removed the Airport Express from its iPod-like packaging assuming that you’re the proud owner of Geekdom’s unsung superstar. But instead, you seem to be clutching a white three-pin plug. Get over it: in the next week, that little white box will change your life forever.

Travelling companion

Imagine arriving at your Euro hotel, but the room has one of those stupidly short strings of Ethernet cable, which forces you to hunch over the coffee-stained desk in the corner.

Airport Express to the rescue: connect it to the Ethernet cable, let it sniff your laptop’s 802.11g wireless signal, then bathe in 54MBps surfing from the polyester cosiness of the bed.

Nice little home-maker

Now get back home, and realise you’ve brought back the bed-surfing habit from your time in the Euro bedroom. Only thing is, your Airport Extreme base station is downstairs, and the signal in your bedroom is showing one bar, reducing you to dribbling dial-up speeds.

Time for the Express to do its thing: set it up to extend the

Extreme’s wireless coverage and marvel at the Zen simplicity of the set-up from your laptop. Now just think of the joy you’ll bring your partner, once she realises that you’ll be by her side through the night, tap-tapping away.

In fact, why not make her life even richer? You’ve brought internet to the bedroom – so why not use the Express’ dinky mini-jack connector to add some mood music?

Dance the night away

The Express can stream files from your iTunes collection on the Mac downstairs. This is the stuff of witchcraft, but it’s too late to go back now – in under two minutes, your partner’s tapping her toes as The Doobie Brothers fill the bedroom.

But shortly after, your partner issues divorce proceedings, and you leave. You sit on the bed in an M4 Travel Lodge: someone’s spray-canning strange words down the side of your Vectra in the car park. But don’t let it get you down: isn’t that a string of Ethernet cable on the desk in the corner…?