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EnGenius XtraRange ESR300H router review: Short on everything

The EnGenius ESR300H High Power 300Mbps Wireless N router is supercompact, even with the 2 external antennas sticking up from its back. Speaking of a total letdown. I was very excited to get my hands on EnGenius' latest router, the  ESR300H --the first in EnGenius' new  XtraRange family --expecting to have some fun, at least with its range. There was no fun to be had at all. The ESR300H is a basic single-band wireless router with almost nothing to show for itself. If it had come out two years ago, it would have been a decent router. Now that the Wireless-N standard has fully matured, the ESR300H is far behind its time. The ESR300H is a simple single-band budget router with all ports supporting the regular 10/100 Ethernet standard. The router offers 300Mbps Wireless-N on the 2.4GHz band. It indeed showed some extra range, being able to broadcast a Wi-Fi signal farther than others of the same pricing. Effectively, however, in my testing, it should be used withi...

SmartDock for Sony Xperia Ion gives an extra jolt

                                                           The SmartDock lands in 2Q 2012. The 4G LTE-equipped  Sony Xperia Ion  is a nice handset, but what makes it truly powerful is the little known  SmartDock accessory. Aside from the usual role of charging the Ion, it also has several features worth looking at. For example, like with several other  Android  smartphone docks out there, an HDMI port mirrors your phone's display on the TV. You can see in our hands-on picture that there's a simple interface for browsing among content and features. Certain TV remotes will also be able to control media playback, presumably through HDMI-CEC. Perhaps what's most interesting is the ability to plug up to two USB devices into the SmartDock, which can support a mouse and keyboard. That certainly could be a nice bac...