Wireless is the word of the year, imagine a world without wires data audio and video flying through the air in an invisible information superhighway....imagine the pigs flying past you windows too!

Well maybe not all of the wireless dream is unfounded wireless media distribution and computing is reality and while wireless networks are now common place (we have one here) wireless media has been a bit slower out of the blocks, however products are starting to arrive like the Linksys wireless media adaptor.

Essentially Linksys have provided a gateway to link you PC to your home entertainment systems, be they TV based or audio, the unit is a wifi 802.11b box which makes all the media stored on your PC's hard drive available to your TV / HiFi. Formats handled by the Linksys box are (MP3 and WMA), image formats (JPG, GIF, TIF and BMP), and playlist formats (M3U and ASX) the user interface is displayed on your TV and allows basic navigation and control over the system.

An application runs on your PC which acts as a media server this looks at designated folders and shares them across the network to the media adaptor which in turn streams the formats to screen or audio system via the RCA connections, the 802.11b allows for 11mbps connectivity which is plenty fast enough for MP3 but would not support video hence it is not listed in the spec, you can also apply 128bit WEP encryption if your existing wifi network is encrypted although this does drop the throughput.

So what do we think of it, lets start with the positives, it does work streaming of MP3's seemed robust unlike a few other boxes we've seen and the audio quality of the unit was as good as the MP3 files used, the wireless network worked well and the encryption functioned fully. And the not so good, firstly the user interface is a little clunky it shows the basics and allows navigation of your MP3 library but pray tell how do you navigate through 25gb of MP3's with only a page next option a search tool seems essential or at least a navigation structure.

Setup was less that straight forward and took a number of attempts and power downs to get it to join the LP.com wireless domain in fact we removed the WEP to join the Linksys unit and then once connected could switch WEP back on, It would also be nice to make playlists on the box currently you have to author M3U or ASX lists on the PC and download them or play tracks or albums, this seems a little daft. Maybe a screensaver type option would be nice if you have this unit plugged into a plasma, otherwise the MP3 control look would be forever burnt into the screen and currently Linksys only say the media adapter works on XP but we found 2K to be ok also.

Overall this unit is like the Grolsch advert "its just not ready yet" it needs the features mentioned above why it doesn't have an LCD screen so you can use it without the TV on we could never work out, in fairness its a good performer but lacks the clarity of purpose and design skill of the SliMP3 we tested earlier this month. In what is becoming a crowded market the Linksys wireless media adapter must do better if it isn't to be an also ran.

Linksys Wireless Media Adapter Win XP...