With wireless networks and home theaters showing up in living rooms, Linksys decided to combine the two concepts into one product: the Wireless-B Media Adapter. In a nutshell, the Wireless-B Media adapter allows you to play music and view photos on your television screen. You use a remote control to choose your tunes and pictures, much like a CD or DVD player. The interface is similar to that of consumer electronics too. No start menus or right clicking here.

We put the Linksys Wireless-B Media Adapter on a complete 802.11b environment, with a matching router and a PC communicating wirelessly. The construction is plastic but it looks sleek and is able to stand upright as well as sit horizontally. You have the option to hook up by ethernet or you can opt to use Wi-Fi using the built in card. Unlike one of its primary competitors, the Prismiq Media Player, Linksys has opted to build one of their adapters inside the unit itself – a smart choice, considering they are the leading Wi-Fi equipment manufacturer for consumers.

Setup is not recommended for the weak of heart. Those who can’t separate a WEP from an MAC are forewarned. Caveat emptor. Out of the box, for example, the device defaults to ad hoc mode and it takes a bit of tweaking using the remote control to get your device on the wireless network by way of a virtual keyboard on screen. The setup menus on your television screen are laid out for the technical professional, not the crowd that includes grandfathers and computer novices. It might have been easier to install a client utility on the PC, have it talk to the PC or wireless router to get the wireless configuration and use color codes so people can match what piece of information goes where. Otherwise, you’re left to figure it out on your own using the cryptic and inexplicable Waiting for Host or Waiting for Application messages. The bottom line is: no talking to the PC, no Wireless-B Media Adapter. It’s as simple as that.

We tested using a PC with the popular Windows XP operating system but found the installation rather lengthy. It involved setting up additional components like the Windows .NET framework. And furthermore, it seemed like this software was less than optimized. By playing music and viewing pictures on the adapter, the Linksys agent would chew up significant CPU times, sometimes hogging the entire computer. The agent also requires someone to be logged into the computer at all times, which might present some problems for the security conscious.

We added an assortment of music files and photographs to the playlist. In combination with the PC software, the Wireless-B Media Adapter is able to handle a large amount of music files, including nested subdirectories. For those of you with extensive playlists, you’ll have to manually build the playlists (on the PC) or ensure you have a very organized file folder structure to begin with. The navigation using the remote is a bit odd and it never got to the point where we really felt comfortable going through a music collection of any size.

The Wireless-B Media Adapter scores points for having music played without pause or dropouts, even in a crowded wireless environment. Volume produced from the device was decent. We didn’t need to amplify the source too much to fill the room with sound.

The Wireless-B Media Adapter worked with all the WMA files we threw at it, but those who customize and tweak their MP3s will find the agent finicky at best. While photos are handled great, especially with the S-Video out option, you’ll find that if you have a massive photo gallery (on the order of tens of gigabytes), the thumbnails generated for the Wireless-B Media Adapter can get pretty large on the client PC. This is something that Linksys should have warned users about before adding their entire stack of high school reunion, engagement, Christmas and baby pictures on the device.

Beyond images and audio, the Wireless-B Media Adapter doesn’t do much else. It can play music while showing photographs, but this ability is limited. We could see multitasking being useful with the television off. An LCD display on the remote would inform us of the song names. Unfortunately, to navigate through your albums, you’ll have to keep the television on at all times. And even then, the Wireless-B Media Adapter has a tendency to mangle long soundtrack or album names.

Shame there is no support for Internet radio either. The underlying processor in the Wireless-B Media Adapter is not PC class (as in x86) but it’s the same one used for Pocket PC handhelds. It can no doubt do a lot more and the feature set provided by Linksys at the launch of the Wireless-B Media Adapter is a far cry from more advanced media players like the one from Prismiq.

A little rough around the edges, the Wireless-B Media Adapter only holds one distinct advantage over its counterparts. It has built-in wireless – good wireless, if you can get it up and running. However, an inconsistent user interface and companion PC client software makes it tough to recommend to novices who could really benefit from listening to MP3s and viewing digital photos without turning on their computers. This Linksys product is not there yet for the masses. Consider it a version 1.0 product – a work in progress.