With today’s move towards wireless, it is only natural that more and more varied wireless-capable products are coming out. While I’m still waiting for my WiFi fridge that will scan the barcodes of my groceries and automatically go online to Webvan and order the ones that aren’t “in stock” and then have them automatically dropped into my window so that I don’t have to go anywhere… wait… I’m in the wrong year, the online grocery thing flopped. Doh! Okay… I still want a wireless fridge. Maybe I can read CNN while I’m trying to decide between a lettuce and a cabbage, or something.

It’s funny how much time has passed since the first MP3s. It’s probably impossible to tell who started the whole movement (though I have this strong suspicion it was this one guy on IRC many, many moons ago), but that is irrelevant: the gist of it is that MP3 is ubiquitous these days, and it’s virtually impossible to go anywhere without stumbling on MP3s, both legal and … paralegal, so to say (meaning “parallel legal”, of course, referring to the fact that they’re also legal!). Sure, other formats are competing, like WMA, RealAudio and so on, but MP3 wins in portability (ever seen a phone that plays RealAudio? No, but I’m sure you’ve seen an MP3-capable one).

So it is only natural that we are getting more and more cool devices that play MP3s (wait… I think I see what I want in my next fridge!). Some do it better than others, some do worse. How does the Linksys fare? Let’s look at it in more detail.

The Linksys device comes in a decent-sized box, which is good, because I like having an OOBE when I get new products (here OOBE meaning, of course, Out Of Box Experience). The Linksys (I’ll call it WBMS from now on, the Wireless-B Music System) assembles like a Lego piece, with the base attaching to two speakers using slide-on rails that hold them in place. The speakers aren’t junk, but if I were Martin Logan, I wouldn’t really worry about competition from them, either. On the downside, if you remove the speakers, the unit looks like it’s missing something, and you can’t really hide it away somewhere since you need to be able to control it. On the upside, the base unit sports RCA plugs for speaker output (you have to connect it to powered speakers or an amp, though, since there’s no amp in the WBMS) and even a TOSLink optical out, if you have a device that supports it. My Minidisc failed on me recently, so I wasn’t able to test if the signal is protected or not; I hope Linksys did not turn on the copy protection bit on it so that you would be able to record music to your Minidisc to listen on it.

So how does this thing play music, that being its main designation? I set out to try it. I opened the box and immediately didn’t follow the instructions: the manual says to connect it by a patch cable to my computer, but I decided to connect it via wireless and let it figure out all the information itself. I did have to go into the onscreen menus to set the WEP key by hand, but once that was done, it connected and was magically on the network. This is where I experienced my first major disappointment, which was mostly coming from my naiveté about technology, copyright, politics and so on. You see, I have a computer which serves as my media server for the apartment. That means that it has a decent size hard disk, and it has all the music I’ve collected on it, and I can easily play it with any of my computers. It runs Windows, so it’s using just your plain garden-variety Windows file sharing. Me being the silly techie who believes in the world being an interconnected place, I turned on the WBMS and started thinking “gee, I wonder where I choose the domain and the username/password to connect to my Windows machine? Boy oh boy, I can’t wait to access my gigabytes of music!”. So I spent a good amount of time browsing through all the menus (which is a task in itself – the screen of the unit is quite small, and it’s not very easy to browse through the menus, even with the remote control). After coming to the shocking realization that there is, in fact, no menu to enter the username and password, I started reading up on the unit, and then it occurred to me, that it won’t simply play any music I want. I had to use MusicMatch to broadcast the music to the device. This was not good. I hate add-on software (I have nothing specific against MusicMatch, of course – but I really dislike the whole bunch, such as MM, RealJukebox, iTunes and so on… I’ll manage my collection myself, thank you kindly. That, and they all just try to shove all the freebie offers down your throat). With a heavy heart, I installed MusicMatch, and created a playlist, which magically appeared on the WBMS. That was fun, and it started playing it. From there, things went fine.

The other interesting function that the device has is the ability to play Internet radio. It has a lot of stations pre-defined, and you can easily add your own. As long as your Internet connection is stable and isn’t powered by smoke signals, you shouldn’t experience any skipping, either: the unit buffers the music and gives skip-free playback. You also get a free trial of Real’s Rhapsody service for a full 3 months, after which you have to pony up $5/month.

The main gripe I have with this unit is the display and the interface. I won’t go as far as saying it’s counterintuitive, but it certainly is much too small. It basically has 3 useful lines (2 more lines are reserved for icons, status, and so forth). If you have a very large playlist… you will find that it becomes a little bit difficult to browse through it. It would have been incredibly useful if there were an alphabetical jump function, such as jumping to any file starting with “N” or something of the sort. A bigger screen could have helped, too: with these sizes, even one extra line makes a huge difference. Navigation is somewhat sluggish, too, which makes going through tracks somewhat of a chore, and requires you to very carefully construct your playlists so that you can avoid reading the tiny screen as much as possible.

The remote control is fairly well-designed, and I have no major complaints or compliments about it – it’s another remote control to lose in the side of the sofa. The range of action is a bit on the narrow side, so don’t try to control the WBMS from the side; but bouncing the IR signal from walls and mirrors is always fun. The front panel buttons duplicate the remote control in some functionality, so when you lose the remote (notice I do not say “if” – I say “when”), you can still control it and make it do things with the front-panel buttons.

What I found interesting is that this unit makes no claims to replace any of your stereo components. It does not have an AM/FM radio tuner, nor does it have a CD player. It also doesn’t have a handle to turn it into a boombox, nor does it take any D batteries (saying “D” makes me think of the old 1989 movie, “Do the Right Thing”).

All said, the Linksys Wireless-B Music System is a very interesting device. It is not, sadly, a killer app; but it has its merits. For me, the true turnoff is the fact that it won’t play my raw, unadulterated MP3s from my Windows file share server. If you are willing to look beyond that, then the functionality it offers is quite nice, especially if you happen to enjoy listening to Internet radio and so forth. There is enough flexibility to satisfy a variety of users, and if the display was better, it would be an even better device to impress someone for Christmas. As it stands, it is geared a little bit more towards early adopters than a mainstream audience that simply must have their MP3s follow them, no matter the hurdles to overcome. For those, it is a perfect device.