That connected-home utopia – WiFi with more speed and fewer dropped connections; easy internet connectivity for streaming video or playing online games on your television; and readily accessible storage for all your videos, music, files and photos – gets closer this week with products from Linksys and Toshiba (the Canvio Personal cloud is known as the STOR.E Cloud in the UK and Europe).
Hard drive maker WD adds router family
The leading hard drive makers seem set on reinventing themselves – extending not just their storage capacities but their product lines as well.
Seagate announced Backup Plus, a drive that can also backup media on your social networks, on Monday and it is in the process of acquiring the premium drive maker LaCie.
Now Western Digital is taking on the likes of Linksys and Netgear with a complete lineup of routers it claims will usher in a “new era of blazing fast HD entertainment streaming”. Read more
Linksys RE1000 makes Wi-Fi go further
This review will be short and sweet – just like the setup process of its subject – Linksys’s new Wireless-N Range Extender – the RE1000. There really isn’t much to the product or getting it to work, but the instant improvement it brought to a long-suffered problem makes it well worthy of a mention. Read more
Cisco boosts home router range
While around 75 per cent of US homes have broadband, only 39 per cent have a Wi-Fi router that makes their connection usable by wireless devices around the house,according to the IDC research firm. That represents a market opportunity for Cisco as consumers bring home more wireless products like the iPad and expect to be able to access the internet away from their hard-wired PC. Hence, its new range of Linksys routers launched on Tuesday, all of them using the latest “N” standard, which has penetrated only 11 per cent of homes to date. Read more
Cisco’s faster route for home media
Wireless technologies have always seemed a black art to me. From Bluetooth to Wi-Fi to 3G, mysterious signal dropouts and connection failures seem to occur at regular intervals. So finding the perfect home Wi-Fi router has been like a search for the Holy Grail, and it hasn’t exactly ended with Cisco’s latest product – the Linksys E4200 Maximum Performance Dual Band N Router. Read more
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Richard Waters has headed the FT's San Francisco bureau since 2002 and covers Google and Microsoft, among other things. A former New York bureau chief for the FT, he is intrigued by Silicon Valley's unique financial and business culture, and is looking forward to covering his second Tech Bust.
Chris Nuttall has been online and messing around with computers for more than 20 years and since 2004 has reported from the FT's San Francisco bureau on semiconductors, video games, consumer electronics and all things interwebby.
Maija Palmer has been writing about technology for the FT since 1999 and is fascinated by cybercrime, privacy and all the other issues of the information society. Based in London, she covers European tech companies and hopes that they won't all get acquired by American rivals.
Robin Kwong is the FT's technology, media and telecoms page editor in London. Formerly he was the Taipei correspondent and wrote about the companies that manufacture the vast majority of the world's computers and gadgets. He is interested in the intricacies of the technology supply chain and how China is increasingly changing the tech landscape.
Tim Bradshaw is the FT's digital media correspondent, and has just moved from London to join our team in San Francisco. He has covered start-ups such as Twitter and Spotify, as well as the online ambitions of more established media companies, such as the BBC iPlayer. He also covers the advertising, marketing and video-game industries. Tim has been writing about technology, business and finance since 2003.
