Pros: A dock that lets you keep your iPod permanently connected to a home AV system, updating and spooling its contents wirelessly using your 802.11b/g network. Compatible with the Apple Remote (sold separately), Macs, and PCs; includes audio cable, Universal Dock Adapters, and software.
Cons: Initial configuration may be confusing for novice to intermediate computer users. Wireless functionality is very limited, permitting only data transfers, and with strings attached – the requirement of pressing a Link button on the dock, and slower-than-cable speeds – that make the use of any free iPod cable smarter, especially given the $150 asking price.
Unique in concept, Silex’s new wiDock is an 802.11g-based wireless dock that is designed for a user who wants his iPod to remain docked in a home entertainment system, yet still retain the ability to add freshly downloaded songs and/or videos from his computer. The Universal Dock charges an iPod and outputs its audio with included cables – an S-Video cable, not included, can be used for video – then uses wi-fi technology and an included CD’s software to transfer content wirelessly from your PC or Macintosh. A rather lengthy initial set-up process – apparently including the need for an Ethernet cable and wired router – is required before it can be used; a button press on the dock enables synchronization.
A wireless iPod? Sign us up. How about a wireless dock? Well, maybe -what would it do? The list could conceivably include some interesting features – the ability to broadcast music to wireless speakers, or perhaps – with really sophisticated software – let you make iTunes purchases without a computer. Like many other companies, Silex Technology has grasped the potential of a wireless iPod dock, but its new $150 wiDock Wireless Dock for iPod does little to harness it: wiDock is designed solely to let you transfer files back and forth from an iPod to a computer without using a cable, assuming you have an 802.11b or 802.11g wireless network already in place.
Stated in the most positive way possible, with wiDock, you might never need to disconnect your iPod from your home AV system again.
You can just dock it and, thanks to the unit’s integrated Infrared port and Universal iPod Dock, use it with a $29 Apple Remote (sold separately) and either iPod or iPod nano, update its contents periodically through the wireless link, then output them through wiDock’s rear minijack audio port and S-Video port. It requires Mac and PC software, plus an audio cable, both included in the box; you’ll have to provide the S-Video cable yourself.
If the idea doesn’t strike you as brilliant from the start, that’s probably because you – like most iPod users – don’t keep your iPod sitting in a dock most of the time. After all, Apple designed it as a portable media player, occasionally docked for recharging and synchronization, but mostly to be carried around and enjoyed. Since you can’t listen to the iPod while you’re synchronizing – except under one situation – why not just connect it to your computer with the included cable, then pop it into any regular dock when you want to listen with your stereo?
In an ideal world, the answer would be that wiDock makes the process more convenient. But in practice, it doesn’t. In order to get wiDock working at all, you’ll need an Ethernet cable and a router with both wired and wireless capabilities. Once you connect wiDock with a cable to the router, you’ll go through a somewhat confusing initial set-up process, which thanks to the included software had us trying two different routers and multiple solutions before discovering what was wrong: even though the software and one router appeared to quickly succeed in configuring wiDock, a process that the device should really be able to handle mostly on its own, it had never searched for or found the SSID of our wireless router, and was erroring out because we hadn’t entered it manually.
If needing to cross-reference various sections of a manual to fix problems like that isn’t appealing to you, stop reading now. But with that problem solved – a day-long frustration – plus Windows Sharing turned on, and a mandatory restart of our Mac, we were ready to see the dock in action, and connected a set of speakers.
As it turns out, wiDock’s execution isn’t really all that smart, either. If you want to use the dock’s synchronization functionality to beam iTunes music over to the docked iPod, you’ll first need to go over to the dock and press a white button on its top to place the system in Link Mode. At that point, the dock will be ready to talk over the network to your computer, and launch iTunes just as if you’d connected the iPod with a cable. The real question is this: if you have to walk over to the dock every time you want to make a wireless connection to your computer, why not just bring your iPod back instead of firing up a slower wireless connection?
We have only one answer to that question. Putting aside the generally not-so-important ability to update your iPod’s music library from afar, which it handles at roughly half normal speed, you do gain the potentially useful ability to access iPod-stored content through iTunes. In other words, hook wiDock up and place your iPod several rooms away, and you can treat it like a wireless portable hard drive, which is pretty cool – in concept.
