We hope Linksys’s marketing effort with the WRT120N won’t blossom into an industry trend, but we know it will. Linksys advertises this router with the tagline “Step up to the speed of Wireless-N!” Read the data sheet, however, and you’ll find this: “Complies with IEEE 802.3u, 802.11g, and 802.11b standards, and [is] compatible with some 802.11n features” (emphasis ours). The 802.11n standard has achieved sufficient brand recognition that many consumers won’t look past the N in the product’s name, and they’ll fail to notice that the Wi-Fi Alliance certification logo on the WRT120N’s box extends only to 802.11b/g.

Yep, this is a single-stream router, and the benchmark numbers reflect that design: The WRT120N achieved less than half the throughput of our zero-point router, Trendnet’s TEW-639GR, in our kitchen, bedroom, and patio tests. It did beat the snot out of Trendnet’s other router, the TEW-652BRP (reviewed on the next page), but the Trendnet’s street price is nearly half that of the WRT120N.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

Router manufacturers have a bad habit of assigning the same names to several different products, or completely changing a router’s underlying architecture and changing only the version number. Belkin has two routers it calls N Wireless (and a third called the N+ Wireless). For the record, we reviewed its model F5D8236-4.

The N Wireless is very short on features, but it turned in first- or second-place performances at four of our six test locations. It delivered TCP throughput of 76.2Mb/s with the client in the kitchen, 38.1Mb/s on the outdoor patio, and 20.3Mb/s in the double-walled media room. (Its throughput in the media room was two to five times faster than everything other than the D-Link DIR-615). Once we moved the client to our more distant outdoor locations, however, the router and client couldn’t maintain a connection at all.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

Trendnet’s TEW-639GR 802.11n router is an ugly duckling that will never grow into a beautiful swan. It also just happens to be the fastest router we’ve tested in some time. It performs well at range, includes a Gigabit Ethernet switch, and with an $80 street price, it’s cheap, too!

The three external antennae aren’t to blame for this router’s homeliness—in fact, we welcome that design choice if it accounts for the router’s excellent performance. Rather, it’s the ultra-cheap plastic shell and the glowing indicator light that screams “wireless router!” like the vacancy sign at a no-tell motel that make this device look so cheesy.

Before we dive into a discussion of what this router can do, let’s cover any limitations that might be deal-breakers for you. This is a single-band router that operates on the 2.4GHz frequency band only, so if your air space is crowded with other people’s APs or you’re looking for a router to pair with your dual-band media streamer, look elsewhere. Likewise if you’re using a VoIP device, since the router’s quality-of-service features are limited to enabling Wi-Fi Multimedia. Lastly, Trendnet didn’t outfit the TEW-639GR with a USB port, so you can’t set it up to function as network attached storage or use it to share a printer over your network.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

Don’t be fooled by the Vantec ezShare’s unassuming looks. This simple six-foot white cable with its Type A USB plugs on either end is actually one of the easiest ways to quickly moves files between two computers. Just plug one end into an available USB port on a box running Windows (XP and up), and plug the other end into the second box.

A Windows Explorer–like app will auto-launch on each machine, letting you drag and drop folders and files between the two PCs. If this sounds an awful lot like Data Drive Thru’s Tornado (reviewed November 2007), that’s because the two products are pretty similar. The file-explorer UI and software functionality of both products are virtually the same. It’s close enough that we have a pretty strong suspicion that the underlying chipsets and software come from the same factory in China. There are a few key differences, though.

Continue reading this review after the jump!